Predictors of lymphovascular invasion identified from pathological factors in Chinese patients with breast cancer

// Sandi Shen 1 , Gaofang Xiao 2 , Richang Du 2 , Ningdong Hu 1 , Xu Xia 1 and Haibo Zhou 1 1 Thoracic Surgery, The Sixth Affiliated Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University, Qingyuan People’s Hospital, Qingyuan, P. R. China 2 Department of Pathology, Yuebei People’s Hospital, Shantou University, Shaoguan, P. R. China Correspondence to: Haibo Zhou, email: wugh01@163.com Keywords: invasive breast cancer; lymphovascular invasion; predictor; pathological factor Received: April 04, 2017     Accepted: December 11, 2017     Published: December 20, 2017 ABSTRACT This study aimed to evaluate correlations between lymphovascular invasion (LVI) and the expression of estrogen receptor (ER), progesterone receptor (PR), human epidermal growth factor receptor-2 (HER-2), Ki-67, CK5/6, epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR), vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), E-cadherin, BCL11A and P53 in invasive breast cancer and to identify predictors of LVI based on these pathological factors. In all, 392 paraffin-embedded tissues from consecutive patients with primary operable invasive breast cancer were included. Immunohistochemistry (IHC) was retrospectively performed using a tissue microarray (TMA) of the paraffin-embedded tissues. LVI-positive rates were compared using the χ 2 test. Correlations between pathological factors were assessed using Spearman’s test. Binary logistic regression was employed in multivariate analyses of statistically significant factors. The results showed that LVI positivity was significantly higher in patients with HER-2-positive expression or high Ki-67 expression. HER-2 expression was weakly positively correlated with Ki-67 expression. HER-2-positive expression and high Ki-67 expression were found to be risk factors for LVI, and associations between LVI and other pathological factors were not significant. Therefore, HER-2-positive expression and high Ki-67 expression are predictors of LVI, whereas the expression of ER, PR, CK5/6, EGFR, VEGF, E-cadherin, BCL11A and P53 is not associated with LVI in invasive breast cancer.