The clinicopathological and molecular landscape of breast cancer patients: a retrospective study in Sulaimaniyah, Iraq

Breast cancer (BC) is the most common cancer among females and the second leading cause of cancer-related death in women, with different management modalities. To determine the premenopausal BC patients' clinicopathological and molecular landscape. This retrospective study was conducted on 300 primary BC patients aged 25–50 years at Hiwa Hematology and Oncology Hospital, Sulaimaniyah, Iraq, from January 2016 to May 2022. Patients underwent definitive management either before chemotherapy or after neo-adjuvant, and on regular follow-up. Patients were interviewed face to face using a well-designed questionnaire to collect the data, including the type of BC and hormonal status. In this study, most of the studied patients were married (90.3%), aged 45–50 years at diagnosis (36%), aged 13–14 years at the first occurrence of menstruation (70.3%), practised breastfeeding (76.7%), parous (85%), and with no surgical history (92%). Most patients (39%) had luminal B subtype, while the fewest (0.34%) had HER2 overexpression. The overall rate of breast-conserving surgery (BCS) was 66.7%, while the overall rate of mastectomy was 33.3% among patients. Also, 83.79% of the tumour margin was free, 9.03% was involved, and only 5.7% of the tumour margin was close. The tumour margin involved 20.3% and 15.6% of cases diagnosed with multifocal and multicentric tumour masses, respectively. It is concluded that married, aged, breastfed, and parous women showed the highest incidence of BC. The most prominent cancer subtype was luminal B, with the highest level of BCS. Most BC patients had a 2–5 cm, unifocal tumour mass with stage II-A disease.