Mr Adrian Richards, Leading Plastic Surgeon at Aurora Clinics explains how men develop breasts, known in medical terms as Gynaecomastia. Male Breast Reduction can be performed by trained specialist plastic surgeons. For more information call us on 01844 214362.

Male Breast Reduction – Why It Occurs

Hello. My name is Adrian Richards. I’m a consultant plastic and cosmetic surgeon, and I’m the Surgical Director of Aurora Clinics which is based here in the UK. Today I’m going to be talking about gynecomastia. This is a condition basically characterised by excess prominence of the breast tissue in men.

Now what causes it? Well, there are a number of causes of it. It often happens in puberty and very old age. In puberty, it’s often due to hormone balances, and normally in nearly every case, if anyone has gynecomastia in puberty, we would encourage them to wait until they’re at least 18, 19 even 20, after puberty age, because a high proportion of the patients with gynecomastia it completely resolves after this stage.

If it does remain after the age of 20, we need to look at some causes for it. Most people have it as an unknown. There’s no particular cause for it found. Circumstances of people there will be a cause. The causes are, obviously, being overweight, marijuana, smoking, some drugs, such as cimetidine can cause it. Have you got any of those risk factors? If you have steroid use, particularly for weight builders, that can increase it. Any of those can cause it. But, as I said, most cases are what we call idiopathic, and that’s just a posh medical word for saying there’s no particular cause. But it can run in families. If you’ve got uncle, father with gynecomastia, you’re more likely to get it.

Why have you got it? You might not be overweight. In fact, most people with gynecomastia aren’t particularly overweight. Basically, that’s the area you tend to put fat down. We all need fat stores. Some people put it in the chest, some people around their tummy. We’ve all seen overweight people, football supporters in a crowd with an enormous beer belly but no gynecomastia. It’s just they don’t put down fatty tissue in that area. They tend to put it in other areas. If you’ve got gynecomastia, it’s just unfortunate that that’s where you tend to put the fatty tissue down.

I often see patients who’ve got gynecomastia, and they try to exercise it away by doing press ups, bench presses, chest exercises. Unfortunately, while this actually makes the pectoralis major muscle, the main muscle here, stronger, it doesn’t affect the tissue over the pectoralis muscle. In fact, it can make it slightly worse in that if you really exercise with bench presses, you make the pectoralis muscle thicker, so you’re actually pushing the gynecomastia forward and you’re making it worse. As I said, it won’t have any effect on the fatty tissue above it. So if you’re doing loads of bench pressures, exercising the muscle, probably best to stop. Exercise everything else, as normal, good aerobic exercise, good weight loss type exercise. Keep your weight down, not too much exercise of the muscle, and that’s probably the best approach initially.

Now if gynecomastia remains after that, you get down to a healthy weight, really we need to explore options of how to treat it. I’m going to be talking in the subsequent video about how we reduce the gynecomastia and the surgical options for it.

Thanks very much for listening. If you’d like any more information about gynecomastia, how it’s treated, and the best way forward for you, please contact us either via the website, which is Aurora-Clinics.co.uk, or e-mail or just phone us on the UK number 01844 214362. Thanks very much.