Infertile men likelier to get breast cancer than fathers

INFERTILE men may be twice as likely to develop breast cancer than those without fertility issues, research suggests.

Breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed form of the disease in the UK, with more than 55,000 people told they have the condition every year.

However, while it overwhelmingly affects women, a few hundred men also get diagnosed every year.

Academics from the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) studied almost 2,000 afflicted men and compared their lives and traits with a cohort of men who did not have the disease.

They found that there was a link with fertility and the number of children, with men suffering from breast cancer twice as likely to be infertile.

The reason for this remains unexplained, but Prof Michael Jones, Senior Staff Scientist in Genetics and Epidemiology at the Institute of Cancer Research said that it might be because of oestrogen and the role of sex hormones in the body.

“In men, the majority of the breast cancers are what we call ER positive, oestrogen receptor positive,” he said.

“In females, about 75 per cent are positive and that means they can be treated with hormonal treatments like tamoxifen, and their survival is better.

“For men, nearly all are positive so that suggests there’s a hormonal factor underlying male breast cancer.

“There’s [more] work to be done on the biological side looking at how sex hormones interact together, and how they might drive breast cancer cells.”

He added that by looking at male fertility and breast cancer there may also be some insights to be gained with regards to female fertility, which remains a big unknown owing to difficulties in obtaining data.

“In the female world, the evidence for infertility itself is very difficult to tease out,” he said.

“And while some aspects of male and female fertility are very different, they also share some of the same biological processes.”

The findings are published in Breast