Abstract
BACKGROUND:
Triple-negative breast cancers (TNBC) are a specific subtype of breast cancers with a particularly poor prognosis. However, it is a very heterogeneous subgroup in terms of clinical behavior and sensitivity to systemic treatments. Thus, the identification of risk factors specifically associated with those tumors still represents a major challenge. A therapeutic strategy increasingly used for TNBC patients is neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC). Only a subset of patients achieves a pathologic complete response (pCR) after NAC and have a better outcome than patients with residual disease.
PURPOSE:
The aim of this study is to identify clinical factors associated with the metastatic-free survival in TNBC patients who received NAC.
METHODS:
We analyzed 326 cT1-3N1-3M0 patients with ductal infiltrating TNBC treated by NAC. The survival analysis was performed using a Cox proportional hazard model to determine clinical features associated with prognosis on the whole TNBC dataset. In addition, we built a recursive partitioning tree in order to identify additional clinical features associated with prognosis in specific subgroups of TNBC patients.
RESULTS:
We identified the lymph node involvement after NAC as the only clinical feature significantly associated with a poor prognosis using a Cox multivariate model (HR = 3.89 [2.42-6.25], p