Prognostic factors help the clinician by providing information on the likely site of initial recurrence, predicting survival time after dignosis, the clinical course after relapse has occured, and the expected response to medical therapy. In order to investigate the prognostic significance of c-erbB-2 overexpression, sections of for- malin-fixed, paraffin-embeded tissue from 60 primary breast cancers were stained immunohistochemically against the c-erbB-2 oncoprotein.Positive reaction indicative of c- erbB-2 overexpression was observed on tumor cells in 25 (41.1%) samples. The overexpression of c-erbB-2 oncoprotein was not correlated with tumor size, lymph node involvement, estrogen and progesteron receptor status, epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) status, histologic type, menopausal status, but significantly correlated with nuclear grade. Overexpression of c-erbB-2 protein was more common among tumors of poor nuclear grade(grade 1)-16%-than those of good nuclear grade (grade 3)-25%-according to Blacks nuclear grading system. Postoperative clinical survey demonstrated a high tendency of recurrence rate and shorter survival time of patients with positive staining tumors as compared with those with negative staining tumors to overexpression of c-erbB-2 oncoprotein. In conclusion, these data suggest that the overexpressian of c-erbB-2 oncoprotein may be valuable for the prediction of biologically high malignant potential and the detection of c- erbB-2 oncoprotein in tumor section may have prognostic value in human breast cancer.
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