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. 2020 Dec:54:114-120.
doi: 10.1016/j.breast.2020.09.006. Epub 2020 Sep 19.

Clinicopathological characteristics and prognosis of breast cancer with special histological types: A surveillance, epidemiology, and end results database analysis

Yiqun Han  1 , Jiayu Wang  2 , Binghe Xu  3
Affiliations

Clinicopathological characteristics and prognosis of breast cancer with special histological types: A surveillance, epidemiology, and end results database analysis

Yiqun Han et al. Breast. 2020 Dec.

Abstract

Objectives: To explore the clinicopathological features and prognosis of breast cancer with special histological types.

Materials and methods: The information of breast cancer patients was obtained from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database (2010-2016). Comparative analyses were performed to explore the difference in clinicopathological characteristics and propensity score matching (PSM) was used to weaken the effects from clinical profiles. Survival analysis was conducted to investigate the prognostic effects from histological types, and the prognostic factors of this group of patients were identified with the univariate COX proportional model.

Results: A total of 242863 breast cancer patients were eligible, of which 230213 individuals were ductal breast cancer (IDC) and 12650 individuals were special breast lesions, respectively. Comparatively, special breast cancer had a lower histological grade, a smaller tumor size, a lower proportion of nodal involvement and distant metastasis, in addition to a higher proportion of triple-negative subtype. The overall prognosis of special histological breast cancer was comparable to IDC, while the survival of HER2 enriched breast cancer was in favor of special breast cancer. With the PSM performance, the prognosis exhibited an inferior profile in the metaplastic breast cancer and was significantly favorable to apocrine, medullary, micropapillary, and papillary breast cancer.

Conclusion: This study revealed that the special histological breast cancer presented distinct clinicopathological characteristics and great heterogeneity in the prognosis among diverse histological subtypes.

Keywords: Breast cancer; Clinicopathological characteristics; Histological types; Prognosis.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Comparative analysis for the prognosis of IDC and special breast cancer with overall survival (OS) (a) and respective OS (b). IDC = ductal breast cancer; Special = special breast cancer.
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Comparative analysis for the prognosis in regard to molecular subtypes including luminal A (a), luminal B (b), HER2 enriched (c), and triple-negative breast cancer (d). IDC = ductal breast cancer; Special = special histologic breast cancer; TN = triple-negative breast cancer.
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Comparative analysis for the prognosis of IDC and special breast cancer after 1:5 propensity score matching analysis. IDC = ductal breast cancer.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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