The current study helps to confirm and expand on the findings from that study, commented Steven J. Isakoff, MD, PhD, of the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center in Boston, who was not involved in either study.
“I think it’s helpful to see in a larger dataset what the spectrum of oncotypes [Oncotype DX] looks like in men. In general, as the study described, we have a real lack of large-scale data in men and certainly no prospective data with oncotypes,” he said in an interview.
To get a better idea of the molecular characteristics of breast cancer in men and how they relate to breast cancer–specific mortality, Dr. Massarweh and his associates looked at deidentified 21-gene assay data from the Genomic Health Laboratory database on 3,806 men and 571,115 women with breast cancer with either no nodal involvement, micrometastases only, or one to three involved lymph nodes.
They also looked at survival data from the National Cancer Institute’s Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) population of patients with breast cancer diagnosed during 2004-2012, which included data on 332 men and 55,842 women with ER-positive and/or PR-positive invasive breast cancer.