Analysis of clinicopathological characteristics and prognosis for triple negative breast cancer / 中国癌症杂志

ABSTRACT

Background and purpose: Triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) is a high risk breast cancer characterized by the negative expression of estrogen receptor(ER), progesterone receptor (PR) and Her-2 that have no specific therapy. This study was to analyze clinical pathological characteristics, survival, and prognostic factors of patients with TNBC. Methods: Clinical and pathological as well as follow-up data of TNBC, treated at the Cancer Centre of Sun Yat-sen University from Jan. 2000 to Dec. 2003, were collected and analyzed. Results: A total number of 128 women were identified as having triple negative breast cancer. The median age of these patients was 46 years, and 60.9% of them had stage Ⅰ or Ⅱ disease. The majority of pathological types were invasive ductal carcinomas, and 78.1% of tumors were staged T1 or T2. And 48.4% of these patients were involved in lymph node. Event-free survival, local replase-free survival, distant metastasis-free survival and overall survival at five years were 71.1%, 84.3%, 75.8% and 83.6% respectively. Though lymph node metastasis, tumor masses, stage and lymph-vascular invasion were all found to be related to overall survival, however, only lymph node metastasis and tumor masses affected the overall survival as revealed by the Cox proportional hazard model analysis. Conclusion: Triple negative breast cancer has distinct clinical and pathological characteristics. The patients are usually young, with large masses, lymph node metastasis, family history of breast cancer and poor prognosis; lymph node metastasis and tumor mass are important prognostic factors.