Abstract

Breast cancer is the most common malignancy of women in industrialized countries and the third in Korean women. There have been a lot of studies on biologic behaviors as well as on the prognostic factors of the breast cancer. In this study, the expression of hormone receptors (estrogen receptor ; ER, progesterone receptor ; PR, and androgen receptor ; AR), bcl-2 and Rb proteins were immunostained on 60 infiltrating ductal carcinomas of the breast. The results were evaluated in relation with the age, histologic grade, tumor size, and status of lymph node metastasis. The expression of ER and PR had a significant inverse correlation with the histologic grade (p<0.001). The expression of AR was significantly correlated with the expression of ER (p=0.039) and PR (p=0.009), but not with other factors such as age, histologic grade, tumor size, and status of lymph node metastasis. There was no relationship between bcl-2 protein expresssion and other prognostic factors, except with the expression of ER. Rb protein expression had a significant positive relationship with PR (p=0.05) and the degree of positivity was correlated with histologic grade (p=0.002). In conclusion, this result suggests that expression of AR is well correlated with ER and PR. bcl-2 has no prognostic value. The significance of Rb protein expression remained to be studied.

• Keywords: Breast carcinoma;Hormone receptors;Androgen receptor;bcl-2;Rb