Men's Awareness of Breast Cancer Risks

Introduction: male breast cancer is a rare disease with increasing incidence, accounting for <1% of total breast cancer cases. Due to the rarity of the condition, research data is sparse and the condition is not fully understood; for this reason, data is extrapolated from female treatment pathways and implemented into care, but has shown lower efficacy rates in males. Aims: to increase awareness of breast cancer amongst men through the improvement of health literacy. Methods: a qualitative literature-review based discussion which aims to investigate the possible reasons for poor prognoses in males compared to females. A poster was developed as an awareness aid to be presented to 15 males to gauge their responses. Results: It was established from the literature that there is obvious poorer treatment response rate of male breast cancer compared to female breast cancers. For question-1, focus group fourteen participants agreed that the poster was an acceptable mean for education of which 57% were from Asian origin. For question-2, nine (Asian 4, white 3 and black 2) selected the ‘strongly agree’ option. For question-3 seven participants selected the “strongly agree” option with the majority were over 50 years 43% of those were Asian. In question-4, there was no obvious trend in either age or ethnicity. Analysis of the open comment section shown that the experience was positive (67%).Conclusion: More research is needed to establish male breast cancer specific data and enable male breast cancer to be identified as another type of breast cancer.