Background: Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is a poor prognostic subset of breast cancer that lacks the benefit of specific targeted therapy.
Materials and methods: A prospective study of the clinical profile of triple negative breast cancer cases at a tertiary referral centre. The duration of the study period was 26 months and the median follow up period was ten months. A total of 111 invasive breast cancer patients were evaluated from 1st August 2009 to 31st October 2011. We examined TNBC patients with respect to clinicopathological parameters, adjuvant chemotherapy regimens and relapse free survival.
Results: In our study, patients were young (median age at presentation, 47yrs), premenopausal (54%), tumour size was discordant with lymph node positivity, the histology was predominantly intraductal carcinoma (90%), histological grade higher than two (90%). Relapses were early and preferential visceral (32%) and CNS metastasises (11.7%). 91% of patients were eligible for adjuvant therapy but only 80% of the patients could complete full course of adjuvant chemotherapy. Anthracycline-based regimens (43%), sequential anthracycline and taxane-based regimen (24%) and other regimes like CMF (13%) were used as adjuvant chemotherapy in eligible TNBC patients. Median relapse free survival in patients following adjuvant chemotherapy was around 10 months at last follow-up.
Conclusions: Patients with TNBC have aggressive clinicopathological characteristics with early and higher rate of disease relapse and therefore derive inadequate benefit from current adjuvant chemotherapy. So, new treatment strategies in adjuvant chemotherapy for TNBC are needed.