Male Breast Cancer Victim Stresses Persistence

Richard Pitre was lying in bed when he discovered the lump.

“I felt this knot behind the nipple and my wife felt the same thing,” said Pitre, a college accounting professor. He had it checked right away, an unusual step for a U.S. man. But it took several months and a range of tests before doctors realized that Pitre had one of the rarest cancers among men — breast cancer. It was one of just 1,300 cases of male breast cancer diagnosed in the United States in 2003. The cancer is so rare that even many health professionals are unaware it occurs, researchers say. But it is becoming more common, Dr. Sharon Giordano of the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and colleagues say in the July issue of the journal Cancer. They found male breast cancer has risen from 0.86 cases per 100,000 men 25 years ago to 1.08 cases per 100,000 men. Giordano predicts there will be 1,600 new cases in the United States this year. Breast cancer affects more than 200,000 women a year and kills 40,000, so men with the disease tend to get overlooked. As a result, they are diagnosed at later stages and are more likely to die, Giordano said. Pitre, of Missouri City, Texas, near Houston, almost became one of those statistics even though he acted right away. “I had it tested in the doctor’s office with needle aspiration and it came back negative,” Pitre said in a telephone interview. “The doctor said it was probably fatty tissue and as a result he said he was in no hurry,” Pitre added. “That was December ’02. In May ’03 I went through a mammogram, ultrasound and a CAT scan,” said Pitre, who was 56 at the time.Finally, a needle biopsy of the lump showed it was cancer. PERSISTENCE PAYS OFF Pitre was glad he was persistent. “I like to follow up on stuff because the body usually speaks to you and if something’s wrong, it will tell you something is wrong,” Pitre said. “That is one of the problems with male breast cancer. The death rate among men is substantially higher than it is among women simply because most men discover it later in development than most women do.” Giordano said no one knows why breast cancer is on the rise among men and women in the United States. Hormones could be a factor, as breast cancer is strongly linked to estrogen. “Men have estrogen too — just not as much,” Giordano said in a telephone interview. Pitre, a veteran of the Vietnam War, said he thinks exposure to Agent Orange could be a factor. “I served in Vietnam 1969 to 1970 and was in an area where there was heavy spraying of Agent Orange,” he said. Agent Orange, a highly toxic herbicide used to defoliate jungles, contains dioxins, hormone-like compounds known to cause cancer, infertility and other sexual effects. They build up in fatty tissue. Pitre had the lump, his entire breast and surrounding lymph glands removed and took the anti-cancer drug tamoxifen for six months until side-effects forced him to stop. For him, the lesson is clear. “Men need to have any abnormality in their chest area examined because too often even the doctors will tell men it is just fatty tissue and won’t even do any type of test,” he said.(Source: Retuers Health News: Maggie Fox: May 2004)