BackgroundTo date, the clinical presentation and prognosis of mixed ductal/lobular mammary carcinomas has not been well studied, and little is known about the outcome of this entity. Thus, best management practices remain undetermined due to a dearth of knowledge on this topic.MethodsIn this paper, we present a clinicopathologic analysis of patients at our institution with this entity and compare them to age-matched controls with purely invasive ductal carcinoma (IDC) and historical data from patients with purely lobular carcinoma and also stain-available tumor specimens for E-cadherin. We have obtained 100 cases of ductal and 50 cases of mixed ductal/lobular breast carcinoma.ResultsClinically, the behavior of mixed ductal/lobular tumors seemed to demonstrate some important differences from their ductal counterparts, particularly a lower rate of metastatic spread but with a much higher rate of second primary breast cancers.ConclusionsOur data suggests that mixed ductal/lobular carcinomas are a distinct clinicopathologic entity incorporating some features of both lobular and ductal carcinomas and representing a pleomorphic variant of IDC.
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