[Grading, staging, DNA content and prognosis of invasive ductal breast cancer]

The importance to prognostication of grading, staging, and image cytometric DNA parameters was investigated in 84 cases of invasive ductal mammary carcinoma. Correlations between tumour size, lymph node condition, and five-year survival were shown to be statistically significant. Similar correlations were found to exist between the grade of histopathological malignancy and various DNA parameters derived from the DNA histogram. However, the relevance of all the above single factors has proved to be of limited value in the individual tumour case. Multivariate analysis of DNA parameters, 80.3 percent in probability, was found to enable the best prognostic prediction of an individual course. These results suggested nuclear DNA content to be an objective marker of biological behaviour of a given tumour.