Clinicopathological features of the triple-negative tumors in Chinese breast cancer patients

In order to analyze the clinicopathological features of Chinese triple negative tumors, we performed a retrospective study of 1993 female unilateral breast cancer patients undergoing surgery in Cancer Hospital of Fudan University, Shanghai, China. Survival curves were performed with Kaplan–Meier method and annual recurrence hazard was estimated by hazard function. We observed that the rate of larger tumors in triple negative patients was higher than that in HR+/ERBB2− women, but lower than that in ERBB2+ subgroup (P = 0.0001). In addition, 21.83% of triple negative patients had four or more axillary lymph nodes involved as compared to 27.40% of ERBB2+ women and 22.75% of HR+/ERBB2− subgroup (P = 0.0056). In the survival analysis, we found a statistical significance for recurrence-free survival (RFS) among the three subgroups (P = 0.0037), with the rate of 72.89% for ERBB2+ patients, 78.40% for HR+/ERBB2− ones and 75.76% for triple negative ones at the 11th year respectively. When it came to hazard peaks, discrepancies existed in different subgroups. Similar to HR+/ERBB2− patients, triple negative subgroup showed an early major recurrence surge peaking at approximately year 2.5 as opposed to ERBB2+ counterparts with a tapering sharp at the 1st year. Furthermore, the first peak of triple negative tumors was higher than that of HR+/ERBB2− patients, but lower than that of ERBB2+ ones. Therefore, our findings suggested biological characteristics and prognostic outlook of Chinese triple negative breast cancers might be more favorable and somewhat different from those in Western populations.