Selected inflammatory breast cancer research published in 2020
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The abstract below is edited for length. Read the free full text article on PubMed Central.
Wang, Z., et al. (2020). A large-cohort retrospective study of metastatic patterns and prognostic outcomes between inflammatory and non-inflammatory breast cancer. Therapeutic Advances in Medical Oncology. doi:10.1177/1758835920932674.
Background and aims:
Breast cancer-related death is attributable mainly to metastasis. Inflammatory breast cancer (IBC) is an infrequent subtype of breast cancer that shows a relatively high rate of metastasis. In this study, we aimed to compare the metastatic patterns and prognostic outcomes of IBC and non-inflammatory breast cancer (non-IBC).
Results:
We enrolled 233,686 breast cancer patients between 2010 and 2014 in our research, including 2806 IBC and 230,880 non-IBC patients. Compared with the non-IBC group, the IBC group tended to have a higher incidence of the human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 positive (HER2+) and triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) subtypes, older age, a higher rate of unmarried status, a lower incidence of black race, poorer tumor differentiation, larger tumor sizes, and a higher frequency of regional lymph node invasion. IBC and non-IBC shared similar trends in molecular subtypes among different metastatic organs. The percentage of the hormone receptor positive (HR+)/human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 negative (HER2–) subtype decreased gradually in patients with lung (IBC 42.5%, non-IBC 55.7%), distant lymph node (IBC 41.5%, non-IBC 54.6%), liver (IBC 31.1%, non-IBC 46.7%), and brain (IBC 30.6%, non-IBC 47.9%) metastases compared with that in patients with bone (IBC 50.8%, non-IBC 69.0%) metastasis in both cohorts. In both the IBC and non-IBC cases, the proportion of visceral metastases increased in the TNBC subtype, especially brain metastasis (IBC 26.4%, non-IBC 21.2%), which had the largest increase. The frequencies of all sites (bone, lung, liver, brain, and distant lymph node) in IBC were much higher than those in non-IBC (bone: IBC 21.1%, non-IBC 3.0%; lung: IBC 11.4%, non-IBC 1.4%; liver: IBC 9.6%, non-IBC 1.2%; brain: IBC 2.6%, non-IBC 0.3%; distant lymph node: IBC 12.9%, non-IBC 1.0%). The most frequent bi-site metastasis was the bone and liver (IBC 2.5%, non-IBC 0.3%), and the most frequent tri-site combination was the bone, lung, and liver (IBC 1.1%, non-IBC 0.2%). Furthermore, univariate and multivariate analyses indicated that IBC was an independent prognostic factor in patients with different metastatic sites.