The prognostic value of node status in different breast cancer subtypes

// Zheng-Jun Yang 1, 2, 3, * , Yue Yu 1, 2, 3, * , Xin-Wei Hou 1, 2, 3 , Jiang-Rui Chi 1, 2, 3 , Jie Ge 1, 2, 3 , Xin Wang 1, 2, 3 , Xu-Chen Cao 1, 2, 3 1 The First Department of Breast Cancer, Tianjin Medical University Cancer Institute and Hospital, National Clinical Research Center for Cancer, Tianjin 300060, China 2 Key Laboratory of Cancer Prevention and Therapy, Tianjin 300060, China 3 Key Laboratory of Breast Cancer Prevention and Therapy, Tianjin Medical University, Ministry of Education, Tianjin 300060, China * These authors contributed equally to this work Correspondence to: Xu-Chen Cao, email: caoxuchen@tmu.edu.cn Keywords: breast cancer, nodal metastases, prognosis, molecular subtype Received: April 08, 2016 Accepted: December 05, 2016 Published: December 15, 2016 ABSTRACT Nodal metastases and breast cancer subtypes (BCS) are both well-recognized prognostic indicators. However, the association between nodal metastases and BCS, and the prognostic value of nodal metastases in different BCS are still remains unclear. Our aim was to investigate the association between nodal metastases and BCS, and the prognostic value of nodal metastases in the different BCS. We found that the breast cancer subtype was closely associated with the pN stage. pN stage and breast cancer subtype were significantly associated with disease-free survival. The subgroup analysis showed that the patients in higher pN stage had a poor outcome than patients in lower pN stage in each breast cancer subtype. Furthermore, when the analysis was stratified by breast cancer subtype, we found that even in the same pN stage (pN0-pN2), there was significant survival difference among patients in different BCS, and Luminal A breast cancer patients had the best survival outcome. However, there were no significant survival difference between Luminal A patients and other breast cancer subtype when patients in pN3 stage. Thus, our study suggested that both lymph node status and molecular subtype played important roles in the outcome of breast cancer patients and they cannot replace each other.