Prognostic Indicators in breast cancer patients
Numbers of clinicopathological factors predict the outcome of breast cancer in terms of risk of recurrence and death from cancer depending upon tumor and patients characteristics. Traditional prognostic factors are number of positive lymph nodes, size of tumor, histologic grade of tumor, lymphatic and vascular invasion and hormone receptor (HR) positivity. Prognostic factors help the clinicians to select appropriate therapy for the patients in such a manner that they will potentially benefit for prevention of recurrence of tumor.
The role of classical prognostic markers like the stage of the disease, presence of metastasis at the time of initial diagnosis, lymph node invasion, age of the patient, HR status, Human Epidermal growth factor 2 (HER-2) and Ki67 expression is well established to assess outcome and response to the treatment.In addition to the traditional prognostic factors, with advances in the field of genetics and molecular biology several promising prognostic factors are emerging.
In the present era of personalized medicine, prognostic factors play an important role in selection of patients at risk for recurrence for administration of appropriate adjuvant therapy.