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Evaluation of estrogen receptor expression as a prognostic factor for very young women (below 35 years) with breast cancer in Taiwan.

e22163 Background: In the past two decades, the incidence of very young (<35 years) breast cancer in Taiwanese has been rapidly increasing to quite close to that of Caucasian Americans. However, the clinicopathological features of this group of patients appear to be different from their Western counterpart. Here, we sought to determine the prognostic value of ER expression for this newly emerging population in Taiwan.


METHODS
We retrospectively collected information on all consecutive very young patients (age <35 years) with stage I-III breast cancer treated at National Taiwan University Hospital between 1997 and 2005. ER expression was evaluated by immunohistochemistry on formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded tissue sections. Tumor with more than 10% positive nuclei was considered ER positive.


RESULTS
A total of 178 patients with a median age of 32 (range: 21-35) years were included. The median follow-up time was 62.5 (95% confidence interval, 42.0-64.2) months. Univariate analysis showed that ER expression was significantly associated with favorable OS (HR=0.48, P=0.03), but not with DFS (hazard ratio [HR]=0.79, P=0.42). Multivariate analysis showed that stage and ER were independent prognostic factors.


CONCLUSIONS
In contrast to the findings in Caucasians, ER expression was an independent prognostic factor for favorable overall survival in Taiwanese patients with very young breast cancer. No significant financial relationships to disclose.