First Comprehensive Report of Clinicopathological Profile of Breast Cancer from Bihar, India

Only a few countries of the world have a population more than Bihar, but due to the lack of a cancer registry, authentic research, and publications, data regarding the clinicopathological characteristics of breast cancer patients from this state are scarce. The present study was aimed to report the clinicopathological characteristics of breast cancer patients at a tertiary care center in Bihar, India. This is a retrospective review of a prospectively maintained database of patients of breast cancer treated between January-2018 and March-2020. One hundred fifteen patients with breast carcinoma were included of which 112 (97.4%) were women. The mean age was 47.28 ± 11.62 years and 54.5% of women were postmenopausal. Most patients had a clinical stage of II or III (44.5% each) while 8.7% of patients had stage IV disease. Invasive ductal carcinoma no special type (IDC-NST) was the most common histology (85.2%). The majority of tumors were grade II (55.6%), lymphovascular invasion was seen in 45.6%, and perineural invasion in 18.4%. Estrogen receptor was found in 41.8%, progesterone receptor was positive in 47.3%, and human epidermal growth factor receptor-2 (HER-2/Neu) overexpression was observed in 39.8%. Triple-negative breast cancer was found in 26.2% of patients. The majority underwent mastectomy (71.3%) while breast conservation was done in 26%. All except one patient underwent axillary lymph node dissection for axillary staging. 43.5% patients received neoadjuvant chemotherapy, 52.9% received adjuvant chemotherapy, while 3.5% patients received palliative chemotherapy. The clinicopathological profile of breast cancer patients from Bihar is similar to that reported from other parts of India except for a lower rate of distant metastasis.