J Korean Surg Soc.  2009 Jul;77(1):43-49. 10.4174/jkss.2009.77.1.43.

Clinicopathologic Characteristics of Apocrine Breast Carcinoma

• Hur H
• Ahn YJ
• Park S
• Kim JH
• Koo JS
• Park BW

• KMID: 1464941
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.4174/jkss.2009.77.1.43

Abstract

PURPOSE: Apocrine carcinoma is a rare type of breast carcinoma, which has not been fully investigated. The aim of this study was to review clinicopathological features of apocrine carcinoma of the breast and to determine if there are some characteristics different from invasive ductal carcinoma.
METHODS
There were 4,064 breast cancer patients who had been managed in the Department of Surgery of Yonsei University College of Medicine from January 1997 to January 2008. Out of the patients, 16 patients with apocrine carcinoma and 2,997 patients with invasive ductal carcinoma were analyzed retrospectively.
RESULTS
The incidence of apocrine carcinoma was 0.4%. Most of the clinicopathologic features of apocrine carcinoma were similar to those of invasive ductal carcinoma. The percentage of estrogen receptor (ER) positivity and progesterone receptor (PR) positivity of apocrine carcinoma were all 12.5%. And the percentage of ER positivity and PR positivity of invasive ductal carcinoma were 64.2% and 55.2% respectively. Androgen receptor was only examined for eleven patients out of the 16 patients with apocrine carcinoma and the result were all positive.
CONCLUSION
Apocrine carcinoma is also a rare disease in Korea. When compared with invasive ductal carcinoma, the disease did not appear to show any other significant difference in clinicopathologic characteristics but the percentages of ER and PR positivity of apocrine carcinoma seemed lower than those of invasive ductal carcinoma.

Keyword

Apocrine; Breast; Carcinoma

MeSH Terms

Breast
Breast Neoplasms
Carcinoma, Ductal
Estrogens
Humans
Incidence
Korea
Rare Diseases
Receptors, Androgen
Receptors, Progesterone
Retrospective Studies
Estrogens
Receptors, Androgen
Receptors, Progesterone

Figure

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  Fig. 1 Apocrine carcinoma. The cells show abundant granular eosinophilic cytoplasm containing coarse intracytoplsamic granules and prominant nucleoli (H&E, ×400).

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  Fig. 2 Disease free survival and overall survival curves of patients with invasive apocrine carcinoma (IAC) and invasive ductal carcinoma (IDC). The curves were obtained from Kaplan-Meier survival analysis. Statistical comparison between two groups was not carried out.

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