Abstract
Background: Despite the favorable prognosis for medullary breast cancer (MBC), the guidelines for the use of adjuvant chemotherapy for MBC have not been clearly established. This study investigated the prognostic role of adjuvant chemotherapy in Korean patients with node-negative (N0), triple-negative (TN) MBC patients. Methods: We included data from 252 patients with N0 TN MBC, obtained from the Korean Breast Cancer Registry database. Patients were categorized as those who did not undergo adjuvant chemotherapy (group I) or those who did (group II). Clinicopathological characteristics, breast cancer-specific survival (BCSS), and overall survival (OS) were compared between the groups. In addition, a subgroup analysis for survival based on tumor size was conducted. Results: A total of 252 N0 TN MBC patients with tumor sizes >1 cmwho were diagnosed between April 1997 and March 2011 were enrolled. The median age was 44.95 years (range, 25-72 years), and the median follow-up period was 93.94months (range, 23-195months). Overall, the BCSS and OS in group II (97.3% and 97.3%, respectively) were significantly better compared with those in group I (89.2%and 86.2%, respectively). In the subgroup analysis, in patients with tumors >2 cmin size, those in group II had significant better BCSS and OS (97.5%and 97.5%, respectively) compared with those in group I (78.3% and 73.9%, respectively). In contrast in those with tumors 1-2 cmin size, there were no significant differences in BCSS and OS between the groups (both 97.1%for group I, and 95.2%and 92.9%, respectively for group II).Multivariate analysis revealed that adjuvant chemotherapy significantly improved BCSS (P = 0.009) and OS (P = 0.007), but only for patients with larger tumors (>2 cm). Conclusions: In patients with N0 TN MBC, adjuvant chemotherapy had a significant clinical survival benefit, but only in those with tumors >2 cm.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | e0140208 |
| Journal | PLoS ONE |
| Volume | 10 |
| Issue number | 11 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 1 Nov 2015 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2015 Lim et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
