Correlation between the histopathological grade and size of breast cancer with axillary lymph node involvement

Abstract EN

Background: Breast cancer account for 29% of all newly diagnosed cancer in female and is responsible for 14% of cancer related deaths in women.

Breast cancer is basically detected either during a screening tests, before symptoms have appeared, or after a woman notices a mass.

Overall risk doubles each decade until the menopause, when the increase slows down or remains stable.

Objective: to find the correlation between the tumor size and grade and involvement of axillary lymph node.

Patients and methods: a continuous prospective study of 50 patients from 1st January 2016 to 1st January 2017 in Baghdad teaching hospital at 1st surgical floor, where almost all patients with breast cancer operated on by modified radical mastectomy and axillary clearance included in the study.

Results: the commonest age group was 5th decade with 32% of patients followed by 6th decade with 28% of patients.

The most common histological type was IDC with 78% and 22% of patients were ILC.

The most common stage at presentation was stage II A with 32% of patients followed by stage III A with 28% of patients.

Tumor size between (2-5)cm (T2) was the most common with 68% of patients.

Grade II was the commonest histological grade in this study with 68% of patients.

Axillary lymph nodes (ALN) involvement increase as tumor size increase, it was 50% in T1, 55.8% in T2, 88.8% in T3 and 100% in T4.

Grade I associate with 25% +ve ALN, grade II 55.8% and 100% in grade III.

Conclusion: The majority of patients in this study were in fifth and sixth decades.

There is delay in presentation of patients as evidenced by the most common tumor size being T2 and the most common stage being stage II A& stage III A.IDC was the most common histological type.

The most common grade was grade II.

The larger the tumor the more incidence of ALN involvement, also the higher grade of the tumor associate with more ALN involvement.

Keywords: Breast cancer, staging, axillary lymph node, histopathological grade.