Tehran University Medical Journal

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Breast cancer is a major cause of mortality in women due to malignant diseases and is the most prevalent type of cancer in western countries. According to investigations which has been done in Iran so far, the prevalence of disease in our country is also very high, therefore complete attention to clinical and pathological findings of this disease would be extremely essential. In this study, the direct relationship between axillary lymph node involvement and the aggressiveness of invasive ductal carcinoma has been brought into consideration. This study is a case series of 90 patients which all of them have had radical mastectomy because of breast cancer and all their samples has been referred to the center of pathology of Imam hospital. Based on modified Bloom-Richardson grading, all the samples have been graded. The study of all lymph node samples related to above cases has also been conducted along with the main study. The most frequent ages of disease was 31 to 40 and left breast had most involvement. From all cases, 12.2% were in grade I with 27.2% lymph node involvement, 66.7% grade II with 73.4% lymph node involvement and 21.1% in grade III with 100% lymph node involvement (P=0.00008). Based on statistical analysis we concluded that the axillary lymph node involvement in breast cancer is strongly associated with the aggressiveness of invasive ductal carcinoma. This important point should not be neglected in planning for treatment of this kind of disease.

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Background: Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women around the world. It has been known for over a century that androgens and androgen receptor (AR) play a role in normal and neoplastic breast cells. The aim of this study was to determined the AR expression on tumor cells and its correlation with other prognostic and predictive factors as well as contribution of AR in patients overall survival (OS) and disease- free survival (DFS). Methods: This retrospective cross-sectional study performed on 189 patients who referred to Medical Oncology Ward of Cancer Institute, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, from April 2007 to February 2010. We performed an immunohistochemistry study for AR (AR441 clone, Dako, Germany) (10% cut-off point) and Ki-67 MIB-1 clone, Dako, Germany) on paraffin embedded blocks. Other data were extracted from patients’ documents. Results: Overall, AR expression was 49.1%. Mean age of the patients with and without AR was 47.86 and 48.49 years, respectively. AR positive tumors presented more in stage I/II than III/IV (P=0.02) and AR were more positive for estrogen receptor positive, lower grade of tumor (grade I/II versus III) and lower Ki-67 (P=0.01). AR positivity had neither correlation with progesterone receptor, HER2/neu, P53 expression or menopausal status. OS and DFS were higher in AR positive patients but did not reach statistical significance. In triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) group, 25% of tumors showed AR expression. AR had non-significant positive correlation with OS in TNBC cancer patients. OS and DFS had significant statistic positive correlation with ER, PR and stage regardless of AR status. Conclusion: Based on this study, although androgen receptor expression showed correlation with other prognostic factors for survival in patients, we didn’t find statistically significant independent relationship between AR and overall survival in patients. As far as there isn’t any targeted therapy for triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), prospective basic and clinical studies regarding AR inhibitors in the treatment of TNBC seems to be logical and valuable.