Association of Epstein-Barr virus with invasive breast carcinoma and its impact on well-known clinicopathologic parameters in Iranian women

Abstract

Background:The association between Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) and breast carcinoma in Iranian women is uncertain. We examined EBV latent membrane protein-1 (LMP-1) antigen expression in breast carcinoma and its relationship with clinicopathologic parameters among a population of Iranian patients.Materials and Methods:This study was performed on formalin fixed and paraffin embedded tissue specimens with a diagnosis of invasive breast carcinoma archived at one university hospital in Isfahan city, Iran. We used immunohistochemistry to detect LMP-1 of EBV in carcinoma and its adjacent normal tissue. The frequency of LMP-1 expression in breast carcinoma and its relationship with age, tumor size, tumor type, tumor grade and lymph node status were then determined.Results:A total of 80 cases were evaluated including 77 (96.3%) ductal, 1 (1.3%) lobular, 1 (1.3%) medullary and 1 (1.3%) mucinous carcinoma. LMP-1 expression was seen in 6 cases (7.5%) of breast carcinoma whereas normal breast tissue adjacent to carcinoma was negative for LMP-1 in all of the cases. A statistically significant association was seen between EBV and invasive breast carcinoma (P = 0.03). No significant relationship was observed between LMP-1 expression on one hand and age, tumor size, tumor type, tumor grade and lymph node status on the other.Conclusion:EBV may play an etiological role in some of the cases of breast carcinoma in Iranian women. EBV expression does not seem to have a significant impact on the major clinicopathologic prognostic determinants of breast carcinoma.

Evidence for the association of Epstein-Barr Virus in breast cancer in Indian patients using in-situ hybridization technique

“…Various studies have reported the EBV association with prognostic parameters in BC and have found EBV positivity to be associated with aggressive features like larger tumor size high histological grade, ER negativity and higher proportion of metastatic lymph nodes . On the contrary, no significant association was reported by other authors …”

Epstein-Barr Virus Infection and Risk of Breast Cancer: An Adaptive Meta-Analysis for Case-Control Studies

“…Such evidence may provide opportunities for the pathogenesis, early detection and prevention of breast cancer (5,58,59). In particular, along with the reports of worse prognosis of EBV DNA positive patients than the negative patients (12,34,37), this can be applied to the treatment of breast cancer.…”

“…While PCR shows a high sensitivity and specificity for the detection methods (5), Immunohistochemistry (IHC) shows a low degree of accuracy (17). Therefore, the two case-control studies adopting the IHC method (34,35) were excluded from the selection of studies for SR.…”

“…The main problems that have caused the controversy about the association between EBV infection and breast cancer were that the impact of the aforementioned EBV prevalence level not being considered and that the experimental methodology of EBV has not been standardized (5,17,34,56). Several kinds of tests for EBV detection have been developed (57).…”

“…When the exclusion criteria were applied to the total of 357 articles, 32 case-control studies were selected. Among these, (1) three studies in which EBV-DNA was not detected in both the subject and the control group (25-27), (2) six studies in which the samples were not tissues (28-33), (3) two studies not using PCR (34,35), and (4) one study that used duplicate samples (20) were excluded.…”