Correlation of ER, PgR, HER-2eu, p53, and VEGF with clinical characteristics and prognosis in Chinese women with invasive breast cancer.

摘要

To the Editor:In recent years, the frequency of breast cancer increased significantly in China with change in the life style. Although the rates of metastasis and mortality in breast cancer patients have decreased as a result of early diagnosis and implementation of systematic adjuvant therapy, it is still not possible to accurately predict the risk of metastasis development in individual patients. The rates of relapse and metastasis are relatively high in our country. The risk of metastasis development is known to increase with the presence of lymph node metastasis, a larger-size primary tumor and loss of histologic differentiation (grade), which is the established breast cancer prognostic marker (1). However, approximately in one third of women, the breast tumors that have not spread to lymph nodes develop distant metastases, and about in one third of the patients where breast tumors have spread to lymph nodes remain free of distant metastases 10 years after local therapy (2,3). Actually, the traditional prognostic markers are able to confidently identify the group of approximately 30% of patients, who are most likely to have either a very favorable or a very poor outcome. New prognostic markers are needed.