Androgen receptor expression and association with clinicopathological features and prognosis in early stage triple-negative breast cancer / 国际外科学杂志

ABSTRACT

Objective@#To discuss the androgen receptor (AR) expresion and its association with clinicopathological features and prognosis in early stage triple-negative breast cancer patients (TNBC).@*Methods@#The present study retrospectively analyzed the clinic data of 1 018 patients with early-stage invasive breast cancer treated at the Breast Disease Center at Peking University First Hospital between January 2014 and December 2016, including 1 011 females and 7 males; the age range was 21 to 92 years, and the median age was 57 years. Patients with TNBC were enrolled, and divided into AR positive group and AR negative group according to the expression of AR.The clinicopathological features were analysed, including menopause status, pathological type, T staging, lymph node involvement, anatomic staging, prognostic staging, Ki-67 index, histological grade, vascular tumor thrombus and neuroinvation, and the correlation between the expression of AR and clinicopathological features, curative effect of neoadjuvant chemotherapy and prognosis were calculated. The Student’s t test was used to compare continuous data, the Pearson χ2 test or Fisher exact test was used to compare categorical variables, and the Mann-Whitney U test was used for quantitative data. The Kaplan-Meier method was used to analyze survival status, and comparisons between groups were calculated by the log-rank test.@*Results@#This study included 148 TNBC, accounting for 14.5% of all patients, in which all patients were females, and the median age was 55 years, ranging from 27 years to 75 years. The number of AR-positive TNBC was 59, accounted for 39.9% of all TNBC patients, and the numbers of AR-negative were 89, accounted for 60.1%. Ki-67 index, histological grade and prognostic stage were significantly different in AR-positive and AR-negative TNBC(P<0.05). There was no statistically significant difference between AR-positive TNBC and AR-negative TNBC in OS (98.3% vs 95.4%, P=0.830) or in DFS (91.4% vs 91.0%, P=0.812). Among TNBC who received neoadjuvant chemotherapy, AR-positive patients showed a lower pCR rate than AR-negative patients(χ2=4.381, P=0.046).@*Conclusions@#AR expression is associated with lower respond to neoadjuvant chemotherapy in TNBC. However, the association between AR expression and prognosis in TNBCs was still not clear.