A clinical and pathological study of triple negative breast carcinoma: experience of a tertiary care centre in eastern India.

Breast cancers which do not express oestrogen, progesterone, or HER-2 neu receptors are known as triple negative breast carcinomas. In western literature they have been found to be extremely aggressive with a poor prognosis. However there is scarcity of data regarding this variety of breast cancer in India.To examine the clinical and pathological character of triple negative breast carcinomas and to compare their characteristics with other variants of breast carcinomas which presented to Medical College, Kolkata, a randomised sample of 72 patients were included with breast cancer attending the department of surgery from January 2008 to June 2008.The clinical and histopathological data along with ER/PR status and HER-2 neu expression examined by immunohistochemical methods were recorded.Twenty patients (27.78%) were found to be triple negative.The mean age at presentation was 35.4 +/- 1.95 years with 17 (85%) out of 20 being premenopausal. At presentation, mean tumour size was 4.7 +/- 0.21 cm. Though 15 patients (75%) presented with stage III disease and 16 patients (80%) had grade III histology, 14 (70%) were node negative and 20 (80%) did not have involvement of nipple areola complex and 19(95%) did not have multicentric disease. Triple negative breast cancer is prevalent in eastern India.They are locally aggressive, common in premenopausal women, but strangely do not tend to present with lymph node involvement or involvement of nipple areola complex. Therefore a more conservative approach might have a role in these seemingly aggressive tumours.