NM23 AND P53 EXPRESSION - CORRELATION WITH DNA-PLOIDY AND OTHER PROGNOSTIC PARAMETERS IN BREAST-CANCER

Breast cancer is a common malignancy and the modalities and the aggres siveness of treatment strategies are variable and depend on informatio n regarding the biological characteristics and behavior of an individu al tumor. Therefore, to improve overall survival it is important to id entify and select lymph node negative patients at high risk who would benefit from adjuvant therapy. Besides prognostic factors such as lymp h node status, hormone receptor status and histopathologic parameters, nm23 antimetastatic gene and the p53 protein were studied in 32 breas t cancer patients. Positive staining for nm23 was inversely associated with lymph node involvement in 82.4% of the cases. Most of the non-di ploid lesions (70.8%) showed a high protein expression. Positive immun ostaining for p53 was present in 28.1% of the cases and was strongly c orrelated with prognostic indicators such as necrosis and histologic g rading. Tumor grade, DNA ploidy and lymph node metastasis were not sig nificantly correlated with p53 protein expression. In this study, all the prognostic indicators studied, satisfactorily explain the importan t characteristics of the biologic behaviour of breast cancer, but the detection of lymph node metastasis is still the most accurate prognost ic factor utilized for a predictive role in disease recurrence.