Immunohistochemical Analysis of Infiltrative Breast Carcinomas in Indian Patients

Breast cancer is the second most common cancer among women in India, following cancer of the uterine cervix. Presently, 75,000 new cases are reported annually and account for 19-34% of all cancer cases among women nationally (ICMR 1989; Badwe et al., 1990; Murthy et al., 1990; ICMR 2001; Siddqi et al., 2001; Saxena et al., 2005). In the central region of India where this study was undertaken, 50 to 70% of breast cancer patients present in an advanced stage (ICMR 1989). Breast cancer is a biologically heterogeneous disease and patients with the same diagnostic and clinical prognostic profiles can have markedly different clinical outcomes. This difference is possibly caused by the limitation of our current taxonomy of breast cancers, which groups molecularly distinct diseases into clinical classes based mainly on morphology. A partial explanation for this disparity in behavior is found in studies using modern techniques including molecular profiling to examine the biologic underpinnings of breast cancer (Ahr et al., 2002; Huang et al., 2003). Molecular profiling has provided biological evidence for heterogeneity of breast cancer through the