Sebaceous carcinoma of the breast: report of four cases and review of the literature.

Sebaceous carcinoma of the breast is an exceedingly rare neoplasm. Little is known about the behavior and prognosis of this type of breast cancer. We report clinical, histological and immunohistochemical features of four cases of breast carcinoma with prominent (at least 50%) sebaceous differentiation. The tumors occurred in four women, aged 25-66, and were composed of cords, lobules and solid sheets of tumor cells with sebaceous differentiation, comprising 50-90% of the tumor mass. The second component consisted of cells with non-vacuolated cytoplasm, present mostly around the periphery of the lobules, or which formed separate tumor sheets with no evidence of sebaceous differentiation and were indistinguishable from a classical ductal carcinoma. Immunohistochemically, three tumors expressed hormone receptors; all cases were HER2-negative and had retained expression of the DNA mismatch repair proteins. Three patients had axillary lymph node metastases, and two patients had distant metastases: one in the liver, lung and bones, and one in the mediastinal and supraclavicular lymph nodes. One patient died 28 months after diagnosis, indicating that mammary sebaceous carcinoma is a potentially aggressive neoplasm. In contrast to extraocular cutaneous sebaceous carcinomas, mammary sebaceous carcinoma is probably unrelated to Muir-Torre syndrome. It should be differentiated from morphologically similar but biologically distinct lipid-rich carcinoma.

Determination of organic acids in wine by zone electrophoresis on a chip with conductivity detection.

An appropriate combination of separation mechanisms (simultaneous use of differences in pK values, host-guest complexations, and the ionic strength dependences of the actual ionic mobilities) provided zone electrophoresis (ZE) resolution of 22 organic and inorganic acids expected in wines on a polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) chip with integrated conductivity detection. These separating conditions offered a framework for the ZE determination of organic acids responsible for some important organoleptic characteristics of wines (tartrate, malate, succinate, acetate, citrate, and lactate). The ZE procedure developed in this context is simple and rapid (ca. 10 minutes' analysis time), while affording reproducible migration and quantitation data for the acids. For example, 0.8-2.0% RSD values characterized the migration times of the acids for 25 repeated ZE runs with the same sample carried out in 5 days in the background electrolyte solution prepared freshly on a daily basis, while 3-5% RSD values were typical for the accompanying peak area data. The concentration ranges within which the acids of analytical interest could be determined in one ZE run covered all wine samples included in our study (100-400-fold sample dilutions were needed to work under the conditions corresponding to the validities of the calibration data). 90-110% recoveries of the acids as obtained repeatedly for one of the reference wine samples used in our experiments indicate a good predisposition of the present method to provide accurate analytical results. This statement also supports the results from the determination of the acids in reference wine samples with claimed concentrations of malic (five samples), tartaric (one sample), and lactic (one sample) acids.