Introduction: Breast cancer is the second most common cancer in the world. Tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes impact tumor progression and response to therapies. Here we aimed to study TILS using the International Immunooncology Biomarkers Working Group guidelines and correlating TILS with clinicopathological characteristics, disease free and overall survival in non-metastatic breast cancer patients.
Methods: Non metastatic breast cancer patients (N = 86) who presented to our department between 2013 - 2015 were retrospectively evaluated. The eligible patients were reviewed retrospectively and primary treatment information was extracted from the medical records. For all of the patients, disease-free survival and overall survival were calculated.
Results: The majority of the patients were 45 years of age or less. The TILS percentage was measured using image analysis. Samples had a range of 1-100%, with a mean 22%. There was 9.3% of the patients having lymphocyte predominant (≥50%), while 90.3% had TILS percentage of <50%. Dividing the patients into low (0-20%), intermediate (20-<50%) and high (50-100%).
The distribution of TILS according to age showed trend towards decreasing TILS with increasing age. The majority of tumors in the study T1 and T2 tumors that had significantly higher TILS percentages compared to T3 and T4 with p<0.006. Patients who were N0 had a significantly higher TILS percentage when compared with N1 and N2 with a p<0.032.
There were 74.4% tumors of the luminal subtype, 11.6% of the Her-2 enriched and 12.8% of the triple negative. There was no statistically significant correlation between any molecular subtype and TILS, but a tendency for Her-2 enriched tumors and triple negative tumors to have a higher percentage of TILS.
Discussion: We noticed that there is a subgroup of patients with exceptionally high TILS, had a beneficial response to treatment and confer additional survival benefit with delayed relapse.
Impact Factor
2022: 6.012
This work is licensed under a