Expression Of Estrogen Receptor Beta In Breast Cancer And Their Correlations With Clinical Pathologic Characteristics And Prognosis

Objective:To investigate the expression of estrogen receptor beta(ER-β) and toevaluate its effects on the progosis in breast cancer patients. Methods:Paraffin-embeddedprimary tumor tissue section from490breast cancer patients were collected consecutivelyfrom January2000to December2010.Immunohistochemical staining was conducted todetermine ERβ expression.Clinical data during the follow up after2to13(median5)years after final diagnosis were analyzed in retrospect. Survival analysis and the Coxproportional hazard model were used to explore the prognostic value of ERβ expression inbreastcance rpatients. Results: The ERβ overexpression rate in490breast patients was22.45%(110/490) and the ERβ negative and low expression rate was77.55%(380/490).There were not correlation between the expression of ERβ and tumorsize,axillary lymph node metastasis,clinical stage and histological grde. The survivalanalysis clearly indicated that patients with ERβ overexpression had poor progression-freesurvival (DFS) compared with the patients with ERβ negative and low expression(P=0.000).The multivariate analysis indicates that ERβ overexpression and the pathologicstages of tumors and adjuvant chemotherapy are the independent predictors of DFS forbreast cancer patients. Conclusion:The overexpression of ERβ predicts a poor prognosisin breast cancer patients.Multivariate analysis shows ERβ was an independent prognosticfactor. The study speculates that only detecting the expression of ERβ can determine theprognosis of the breast cancer patients.