1Department of Surgery, Yonsei University Colleage of Medicine, Seoul, Korea. 2Department of Pathology, Yonsei University Colleage of Medicine, Seoul, Korea.
ABSTRACT
PURPOSE: We investigated the clinical characteristics of breast cancers and its significance.
MATERIAL AND METHOD: We evaluated the clinical characteristics of 500 women with breast cancer who were diagnosed and treated by one surgeon between March 1991 and August 1996.
RESULTS: The median age was 46.7 years and the most common age group was 40's. The presenting symptoms for most patients were palpable mass (75.2%) followed by abnormal mammographic findings (8.4%), pain (6.3%) and nipple discharges (4.7%), and the duration of symptoms was less than 1 month in 41.4%. Fifty three percent of the 500 cases had T2 lesion (size; 2 to 5 cm). With the increase of tumor size, overall and disease free survival rates (OS, DFS) were decreased. Surgical treatment consisted of modified radical mastectomy (52.8%) and partial mastectomy (33.6%) The most common stage was II (42.3%) and the early breast cancer (stage 0, I, II) was 388cases (78.1%) and the stage were inversely correlated with DFS and OS. The positivity of axillary lymph node was 39.3% and the number of the metastatic lymph nodes was inversely correlated with DFS and OS. The pathologic types were infiltrating ductal carcinoma (83.0%), ductal carcinoma in situ (12.8%), infiltrating lobular carcinoma (1.2%), lobular carcinoma in situ (0.4%) and Paget's disease (2.0%). ER positivity was 48.9% and PR 46.9%. ER positive patients showed survival benefit compared to ER negative patients. The common sites of distant metastases were lung, bone and liver.
CONCLUSIONS: Our patients with breast cancer were younger than those of western and showed the impacts on survival according to the lymph node status,tumor size.
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