PLoS ONE (Jan 2019)

Assessing the prognostic factors, survival, and recurrence incidence of triple negative breast cancer patients, a single center study in Iran.

  • Seied Asadollah Mousavi,
  • Amir Kasaeian,
  • Maziar Pourkasmaee,
  • Ardeshir Ghavamzadeh,
  • Kamran Alimoghaddam,
  • Mohammad Vaezi,
  • Hosein Kamranzadeh Fumani,
  • Davoud Babakhani,
  • Sahar Tavakoli

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0208701
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 14, no. 1
p. e0208701

Abstract

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BackgroundBreast cancer is the second leading cause of death due to cancer in women. Triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) is a subgroup with unique behavior. There is a controversy in organ involvement in metastasis. In this study, we planned to define the prognostic factors, survival, and recurrence incidence of patients.Materials and methodAmong the 583 patients with breast mass referred to hematology and oncology clinic in Shariati hospital, Tehran, Iran from March 2005 to March 2015, fifty four patients entered the survival analysis whom we followed for two years until March 2017. Overall survival (OS) and disease-free survival (DFS) and Cumulative recurrence incidences (RI) were estimated. Univariate and multivariate Cox proportional hazards regression was performed to assess risk factors in predicting OS and DFS.ResultsMedian follow up for the patients was 5.00 years. The five-year OS, DFS and RI were 86.13% (95% CI (71.42-93.59), 63.09% (95% CI (47.04-75.49) and 32.15% (95% CI (19.52-47.43) respectively. Among the factors studied OS, DFS and RI differed significantly only between patients with and without nodal involvement (P = 0.004, P = 0.003, and P = 0.02 respectively). On the other hand, based on the univariate modeling, patients with nodal involvement had a higher risk of breast cancer-specific death (HR: 17.99, P = 0.004). Furthermore, patients with nodal involvement had a higher risk of breast cancer-specific death or recurrence (HR = 5.64, P = 0.008). In Multivariate model, just the nodal involvement significantly changed the hazard for OS (HR = 23.91, P = 0.001). As the nodal involvement was the only significant risk factor at the 0.2 level of significance, we can consider the hazard ratio of lymph node positivity in DFS univariate models as adjusted hazard.ConclusionThe only factor with significant effect on OS, DFS and RI was nodal involvement in the pathology report.