Manni A:

Endocrinology of Breast Cancer, 400 pp, Totowa, NJ, Humana Press, 1999 ($125).

A more appropriate title for this book might be Endocrinology of the Breast in Health and Disease. The focus of this multiauthored text is a state-of-the-art review of the role of hormones in normal breast development and in benign and malignant diseases. The usefulness of this information to anatomic pathology is remote, and, as suggested by the publishers, the expected readership is endocrinologists, oncologists, pharmacologists, and surgeons.

As one might expect, estrogen, progesterone, prolactin, and androgens are the focus of this 400-page, 23-chapter book. The physiologic function and mechanism of action of these hormones and their role in breast cancer development and progression and their use as targets in anticancer therapy are discussed in length and sometimes repeatedly in multiple chapters. Excellent reviews of oncogenes, tumor suppressor genes, growth factors, and tumor stroma in breast cancer are presented in several chapters; however, they seem somewhat out of place in this book.

Physiology, basic research, current advances, molecular biology, and clinical therapies are the focus of this text. Histopathology of breast diseases is presented in only one short, well-written chapter in which entities are discussed and illustrated in their relationship to breast cancer risk. Several chapters contain a significant number of obvious typographical errors. The references are extensive but already dated, as is some of the text.

If you are very interested in the endocrinology of breast development and disease, there probably is no other book available that deals with this area as completely and as currently as this one. Thus, it is a significant contribution to the breast literature.