Clinicopathological features of the triple-negative tumors in Chinese breast cancer patients

Abstract

In order to analyze the clinicopathological features of Chinese triple negative tumors, we performed a retrospective study of 1993 female unilateral breast cancer patients undergoing surgery in Cancer Hospital of Fudan University, Shanghai, China. Survival curves were performed with Kaplan-Meier method and annual recurrence hazard was estimated by hazard function. We observed that the rate of larger tumors in triple negative patients was higher than that in HR+/ERBB2- women, but lower than that in ERBB2+ subgroup (P = 0.0001). In addition, 21.83% of triple negative patients had four or more axillary lymph nodes involved as compared to 27.40% of ERBB2+ women and 22.75% of HR+/ERBB2- subgroup (P = 0.0056). In the survival analysis, we found a statistical significance for recurrence-free survival (RFS) among the three subgroups (P = 0.0037), with the rate of 72.89% for ERBB2+ patients, 78.40% for HR+/ERBB2- ones and 75.76% for triple negative ones at the 11th year respectively. When it came to hazard peaks, discrepancies existed in different subgroups. Similar to HR+/ERBB2- patients, triple negative subgroup showed an early major recurrence surge peaking at approximately year 2.5 as opposed to ERBB2+ counterparts with a tapering sharp at the 1st year. Furthermore, the first peak of triple negative tumors was higher than that of HR+/ERBB2- patients, but lower than that of ERBB2+ ones. Therefore, our findings suggested biological characteristics and prognostic outlook of Chinese triple negative breast cancers might be more favorable and somewhat different from those in Western populations.

Clinicopathological features of triple-negative breast cancer in Taiwanese women

“…Therefore, tumor subgroup (TNBC versus non-TNBC) was also a prognostic factor for 5-year OS or 5-year DFS in our study. This finding differs with some publications in Asian countries [7,16], but is consistent from reports from Western countries [20,21]. TNBC is characterized by distinct clinical features and genetic patterns, and this heterogeneity of TNBC may require different diagnostic and therapeutic interventions.…”

“…Our data show that TNBC in Taiwan may have different prognostic factors and characteristics than the disease has in Western countries, possibly because of genetic heterogeneity. The incidence of TNBC in our population stands at 21.4%, which is higher than that reported in the literature [4,5,16]. In Japan, the triple-negative subtype accounts for 15.5% of breast cancers from surveillance data of the Registration Committee of the Japanese Breast Cancer Society, with a predominance of postmenopausal women [14].…”

“…Lund et al [6] reported a higher prevalence of TNBC among African-American women (46.6%) than white women (21.8%). However, there are few publications on the incidence of TNBC in Asian women [4,7,[14][15][16]. Our data show that TNBC in Taiwan may have different prognostic factors and characteristics than the disease has in Western countries, possibly because of genetic heterogeneity.…”

Adjuvant Tamoxifen Influences the Lipid Profile in Breast Cancer Patients

“…Many oncologists believe that breast cancer is a clinically heterogeneous disease with different responses to therapy [1,2,3,4]. Of interest, some studies have suggested that adjuvant tamoxifen exhibits different effects on the lipid and liver profiles of cancer patients [5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25].…”

Response and prognosis of taxanes and anthracyclines neoadjuvant chemotherapy in patients with triple-negative breast cancer

“…Liedtke et al (2008) reported that patients with triple-negative breast cancer had significant higher pathological complete remission (pCR) rate compared with non-triple-negative disease, whereas triplenegative breast cancer patients with residual disease (RD) after neoadjuvant chemotherapy had worse prognosis. Yin et al (2009) have recently reported that there were some dissimilarity between Chinese breast cancer patients and western population, which raises the question whether the triple-negative paradox (chemosensitive but poor survival) holds true in Chinese population. In this study, we used immunohistochemistry to classify tumor into TNBC and non-TNBC and examined the relationship between neoadjuvant chemotherapy response and long-term clinical outcome, including disease-free survival (DFS) and overall survival (OS).…”