Correlation of steroid hormone receptor status with histological and nuclear grading in breast carcinoma

The present study was performed to evaluate the immunohistochemical analysis of estrogen receptor (ER) and progesterone receptor (PR) in invasive breast carcinomas of various histological subtypes and grades. In this paper an attempt was made to establish a correlation between hormone receptor status and histological and nuclear grading of breast carcinoma.

Immunohistochemistry was performed on paraffin sections of 80 invasive breast carcinomas (38 ductal, 18 lobular, 18 ducto-lobular, 2 medullary, 2 mucinous, 1 tubular and 1 papillary). The same scoring system was used for immunohistochemically stained ER and PR. The results were compared with the histological and nuclear grade and analyzed by the chisquare test.

Positive immunoreactivity for ER and PR were seen in 71.25% and 60.00% cases, respectively. Both ER and PR positive immunostaining was observed in all (100%) well-differentiated (grade I) breast carcinomas, while in grade II tumors ER and PR-positive cancer cells were 76.36% and 61.62%, respectively. The corresponding figures for grade III carcinomas were 41.18% and 35.29%. A significant association (p <0.05) between different histological grades of breast carcinomas and ER and PR immunoreactivity was found. No significant association was found between nuclear grade of breast carcinoma and ER and PR immunoreactivity.

The results presented herein suggest that histological grade of invasive breast carcinoma was significantly associated with ER and PR immunoreactivity, while nuclear grade alone showed no correlation. Moreover, our findings showed that ER and PR positivity declined with increasing tumor grade.