Correlation of hormonal receptor status and oxidative stress in prognosis of breast cancer: first experience from Eastern India

Aim/Background

Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) and basal-like breast cancer (BLBC) are breast cancer (BC) subtypes with an especially poor prognosis. Oxidative DNA damage is reportedly increased in BC tissues relative to normal breast. Till date no sufficient evidence has been found to evaluate the correlation between the oxidative stress (OS) and Her2/neu and ER, PR mediated BC as well as their prognosis. This study was conducted to evaluate the association between OS and hormone receptor (HR) status among the Eastern Indian BC patients.

Methods

Altogether 117 BC patients who had undergone surgical treatment were selected from the oncology unit of our institute (NCRI). All the paraffin embedded surgical specimens were tested for immunohistochemical study. 63 age matched controls have been systematically investigated. 6 ml blood sample has been collected aseptically from each patient. Total oxidant status (TOS), total antioxidant status (TAS), the thio barbituric acid reactive substances (TBARS), free reactive iron (FRI) was analyzed form the blood. The comparisons of OS among the BC patients with different receptor status have been calculated statistically.

Results

Mean age of these 117 patients is 47.16 ± 11.82. Among our patients 42.39% ER⁺, 52.17% PR⁺ cancer and 20.58% triple negative cancer (TNBC) were observed. We found among the patients, the generation of free radical is significantly higher TNBC (p < 0.01) compare to the non-TNBC group. Moreover, Pearson's correlation coefficient (r) indicated significant correlations between OS and expression of HR.

Conclusions

This is the first report from Eastern India which established oxidative stress was directly associated with hormonal expression in BC patients. We found correlation between lipid peroxidation and HR status among the patients in comparison to control subjects. Therefore HR plays an important role to depletion of critical antioxidants and generation of reactive oxygen species (ROS). Evidently, it can be concluded that cellular redox state markers may be promising targets when elucidating the pathogenesis of TNBC, which may help the clinicians to advise the antioxidant drugs to the triple negative patients to get better treatment outcome.

Clinical trial identification

N.A

Disclosure

All authors have declared no conflicts of interest.