Current Oncology (Feb 2023)

Factors Influencing Lymph Node Positivity in HER2/neu+ Breast Cancer Patients

  • Katherine Englander,
  • Neha Chintapally,
  • Julia Gallagher,
  • Kelly Elleson,
  • Weihong Sun,
  • Junmin Whiting,
  • Christine Laronga,
  • Marie Catherine Lee

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/curroncol30030215
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 30, no. 3
pp. 2825 – 2833

Abstract

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Axillary lymph node metastases are a key prognostic factor in breast cancer treatment. Our aim was to evaluate how tumor size, tumor location, and imaging results correlate to axillary lymph node diseases for patients with stage I-III HER2/neu+ breast cancer. This is a single-institution retrospective chart review of female breast cancer patients diagnosed with primary invasive Her2/neu+ breast cancer who were treated with upfront surgical resection from 2000–2021. Of 75 cases, 44/75 (58.7%) had nodal metastasis, and there was a significant association of larger tumor size to nodal metastases (p ≤ 0.001). Patients with negative nodes had a smaller mean tumor size (n = 30; 15.10 mm) than patients with positive nodes (n = 45; 23.9 mm) (p = 0.002). Preoperative imaging detected suspicious nodes in 36 patients, and ultrasound detected the most positive nodes (14/18; p = 0.027). Our data confirms that tumor size at diagnosis is correlated with a higher likelihood of axillary involvement in patients with Her2/neu+ breast cancer; notably, a large proportion of Her2/neu+ breast cancers have metastatic involvement of axillary lymph nodes even with small primary lesions.

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