Apocrine carcinoma of the male breast: a case report of an exceptional tumor

Abstract

Apocrine carcinoma of the male breast is an exceptional malignant tumor. It does not have a particular clinical or radiological appearance, but it's microscopically characterized by the presence of granular cells and foamy cells representing over 90% of tumor cells. These cells express most of the time the GCDFP-15 and the androgen receptors. This tumor is a distinct molecular entity. In this observation, we report the case of a 70 year old man presenting apocrine carcinoma of the left breast diagnosed at the stage of lung metastasis.

Aggressive Male Breast Cancer—Clinical and Therapeutic Aspects Correlated with the Histopathological Examination: A Case Report and Literature Review

“…Most of the cases in our review had as their main symptom the presence of a tumor mass in the breast or axilla. Eleven cases presented tumors larger than 2 cm in size [14][15][16][17][20][21][22][23][24][25]27], while four cases had smaller sizes [19,21,26].…”

“…All patients underwent biopsy for diagnostic purposes, either with a core needle in five cases [14][15][16]18,22], fine-needle aspiration in four cases [23][24][25]27], or excisional biopsy in seven cases [17,[19][20][21]26]. Given that MBC is rare and there are not enough surgeons specialized in breast surgery in our country, there is a lack of experience in the management and early diagnosis of this type of cancer.…”

Breast Apocrine Carcinoma Detected Incidentally as Axillary Lymphadenopathy in a CT Scan

“…The non-pure BAC immuno-histochemistry panel frequently shows a lower expression rate for oestrogen and progesterone receptors than IDC-NS, however, this is not always true. Also, it has variable HER2 expression with positivity ranging between 30% and 57% but it is mostly associated with AR expression (in about 54% of cases) [ 4 , 6 , 14 ]. As mentioned earlier, the triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) subtype pattern (as our case) is reported to be more associated with pure BAC [ 5 ].…”

“…A pure BAC diagnosis is applied when apocrine morphology is found in >90% of tumour cells, which typically are oestrogen receptor (ER) negative, progesterone receptor (PR) negative, human epidermal growth factor receptor-2 (HER2) negative, and ARpositive. However, some reports claim that BAC, in general, may show HER2 overexpression in ~30-57% of cases [3][4][5][6]. Its prognosis is similar to breast IDC-NST when matched for tumour stage and histological grade [2,7].…”

Apocrine breast carcinoma as an extremely rare breast cancer subtype – histopathological characteristics

“…According to estimations performed in 2017 by American Cancer Society, breast cancer (BC) is expected to reach 30% of all new cancers diagnosed among women [1]. Apocrine carcinoma (AC) is one of the rarest histological types of this malignancy, comprising from 0.3% to 4% of all cases [2]. ACs are usually estrogen receptor-negative (ER-), progesterone receptor-negative (PR-), but in 100% of cases androgen receptor-positive (AR+).…”