Androgen receptor expression identifies patient with favorable outcome in operable triple negative breast cancer

// Xiao-Qing Hu 1 , Wei-Li Chen 2 , Hai-Guang Ma 1 and Ke Jiang 2 1 Department of Surgical Oncology, Wenzhou Central Hospital, Zhejiang, China 2 Department of Breast Surgery, Yue Yang Hospital of Traditional Chinese & Western Medicine, Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Shanghai, China Correspondence to: Ke Jiang, email: Surgeonjk@sina.com Keywords: androgen receptor, triple negative breast cancer, prognostic biomarker, disease-free survival, overall survival Received: December 27, 2016 Accepted: March 15, 2017 Published: April 07, 2017 ABSTRACT In this study we sought to investigate the prevalence and prognostic value of androgen receptor (AR) status in operable triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) patients. We collected the clinical data of 360 patients with TNBC, and found a positivity AR expression of 31.4% with a cut-off value of 10%. Tumors expressing the negative CK5/6 (P=0.013) and low Ki-67 (P=0.007) are more likely to have positive AR. In multivariate survival analysis, AR expression is correlated with increased DFS (HR=0.467, 95%CI 0.271-0.805; P=0.006) and OS (HR=0.488, 95%CI 0.267-0.894, P=0.020) independently. In addition, patients with AR+ tumors are more likely to have favorable outcome in patients with young, pre-menopausal, large tumor size, more node involvement (4+), high stage, high grade, vascular invasion+, P53+, CK5/6-, and higher Ki-67. Our study has indicated that the absence of AR might help to identify patients with relatively higher risk of disease relapse and death, and further clinical studies of anti-androgen agents are warranted to enrich the therapeutic strategy options for AR+ TNBCs.