Document Type

Article

Department

Pathology and Laboratory Medicine; Radiology

Abstract

Background: Neo-adjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) is frequently administered in breast carcinoma patients. The clinical response to NAC guides further treatment. The pathological response is not only an independent prognostic factor, but it also guides further treatment and prognosis.
Objectives: The aim of our study was to find the degree of concordance between clinical and pathological response assessments after NAC in Invasive lobular Carcinoma (ILC) cases by using World Health Organization (WHO) criteria and different pathological systems, respectively. We also tried to identify any useful parameter of clinical assessment that could better correlate with pathologic assessment and provide a better estimation of residual tumor.
Methods: This retrospective study was conducted on 26 ILC tumors diagnosed in 24 patients who were treated with NAC followed by surgical resection between January 2009 and December 2020. Medical records and microscopy glass slides were reviewed for clinical and pathological response assessments, respectively.
Results: The pre-treatment tumor area ranged from 1.8-255 cm2 and the mean±SD was 52.2±66.8 cm2. After NAC, complete clinical response was observed in four (15.3%) cases. The clinically assessed mean tumor area significantly reduced from 52.2±66.8 cm2 to 17.2±22.6 cm2 (p-value2) didn’t differ significantly from the clinically assessed mean tumor area (17.2±22.6 cm2) (p-value=0.114). Pathologically, the majority of the cases showed partial response, and a complete pathological response was achieved in only two (7.7%) cases. The concordance rates between clinical assessment by the WHO method and pathological assessment of the breast using the Sataloff method, Miller-Payne (MP) system, Residual Cancer Burden system, and Chevallier method were 26.7%, 15.8%, 9%, and 3.5%, respectively, with insignificant p-values. Percentage reduction in clinical size and percentage reduction in tumor cellularity differed significantly (p-value=0.038).
Conclusion: Clinical response assessment provides a less accurate estimation of residual disease, as it shows poor concordance with pathological assessment using different assessment systems/methods.

Comments

Pagination are not provided by the author/publisher

Publication (Name of Journal)

Cureus

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Download

Share

COinS