Impact of malnutrition and anemia at diagnosis in both: Pathological response and tumor-infiltrating-lymphocytes post neoadjuvant chemotherapy.

Abstract

e12654 Background: The response after neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) is the main prognostic factor in breast cancer (BC), likewise, malnutrition, anemia and systemic inflammation have also been associated to prognosis in breast cancer. We evaluated the association between pathological response (PR) and tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) post NAC with nutritional predictors as body mass index (BMI), prognostic nutritional index (PNI), anemia and neutrophil/lymphocyte index (N/L). Methods: This is a retrospective analysis of women diagnosed with BC between 2006 to 2017 at Instituto Nacional de Enfermedades (INEN) who received NAC. Pathological response was classified through residual cancer burden (RCB) and TILs post NAC which were prospectively evaluated by a pathologist. Clinical and pathological features as well as survival status were obtained from patient files. Results: We identified 439 women with BC who received NAC. Median age was 49 years, histological grade 3 was found in 245 patients (55.8%) and stage IIIB was the most frequent at diagnosis with 257 patients (58.5%). Luminal B subtype was the most frequent (43.7%). Rate of pCR was 10.5% and median TILs post NAC was 20%. About nutritional predictors, we use the median as a cutoff to discriminate between high and low values, for BMI was 27.5, for PNI was 56, for hemoglobin was 13.2 and for NLR was 1.84. There was no association for TILs post NAC with BMI (p = 0.38), PNI (p = 0.057) and hemoglobin (p = 0.43). We found a positive association between ILN and TILs post NAC (p = 0.001). On the other hand, we don’t found association for RCB with BMI (p = 0.45), PNI (p = 0.641), ILN (p = 0.2) and hemoglobin (p = 0.15). In the multivariate analysis, only RCB was an independent predictor for DFS (95 % CI, 87-100.5; p = 0.00001) and OS (95 % CI, 101.8-114.1; p = 0.00001). There was no association between BMI, PNI, ILN and anemia with OS and DFS. For the TILs post NAC there was a tendency to association with DFS (p = 0.07) and OS (p = 0.07). Conclusions: There are association between neutrophil/lymphocyte index with TILs after NAC. There was no association between nutritional and systemic predictors with long-term outcomes. The pathologic response is a biomarker for predicting the long-term outcomes of breast cancer patients.