ABSTRACT
Background: breast cancer is the most common malignancy in women. Some biologic markers are used for determination of prognosis and prediction of treatment response. Cytokeratin 7 [CK7] is an Intermediate filament protein of epithelial cells. The purpose of this study, is to determine the expression of cytokeratin 7 in primary breast cancer and it's correlation with grade, stage and axillary lymphnode involvement
Materials and Methods: this was a cross-sectional study performed on 75 samples of patients with breast cancer admitted in Mostafa Khomeini Hosptial [2000-2005]. After preparing the samples, a tissue section from each samples was obtained. One of the tumoral section and one of the lymphnode sections were stained by H and E. We determined the type of the tumor, the number of lymphnodes, the stage and the grade of the tumor. We studied cytokeratin 7 with monocolonal antibady by IHC
Results: our study showed that 93.3% of samples were positive for cytokeratin 7. 70.7% of patients had lymphnod involvement, 57.3% of samples were in stage II and the most of patients [42.7%] were in grade II. In this study, we found significant relation between cytokeratin 7 and lymphnode involvement [P=0.002], lymphnode number [P=0.004] and stage [P=0.002]. We didn't find any relationship between CK7 and grade
Conclusion: according to he results of previous studies and our study, it seem that cytokeratin 7 is a prognostic factor in breast cancer. But further investigations with more specimens and long-time follow-up is required to clarify the exact role of cytokeratin 7 in prognosis of breast cancer