Descriptive study of triple negative breast cancer in Eastern Algeria

Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is characterized by the lack of estrogen receptor, progesterone receptor and human epidermal growth factor receptor-2 (HER-2) expression. It is aggressive and most common in African women. In this study we identified the frequency, clinical an pathological characteristics of this type in a cohort of women in Eastern Algeria.

We conducted a retrospective study between January 2010 and December 2015 at the regional hospital of Constantine in eastern Algeria. Among 472 women with breast cancer, 102 women had a TNBC. Clinical and pathological features and overall survival were analyzed.

21.61% of patients had TNBC with a median age of 52 years. 65.31% of the patients were menopausal. Only 6.82% of women had a family history of breast cancer. The majority of patients had infiltrating ductal carcinoma (96.08%), the proportion of grade III SBR was 53.92%. The average tumor size was 4.4cm and 70.1% of the tumors had a very large size (T2 and T3). 69.07% of patients had positive lymph nodes, vascular invasion was found in 48.57% of cases. Metastatic sites were bone in 16.13% of cases, hepatic in 3.26% and pulmonary in 0.98%. For treatment modalities, 95.24% underwent surgery and adjuvant chemotherapy. 33.33% of patients have received neoadjuvant chemotherapy with 29% of complete pathologic response (pCR) and 96.97% have received radiotherapy. Overall Survival (OS) for all patients at 5 years was 45.2%.

Most of our results are in accordance with literature data, however we noted some discrepancies. In this study, TNBC is more common in menopausal women than non menopausal women and characterized by a low rate of visceral metastases and a lower overall survival at 5 years.