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High pHER-2 levels associated with inferior DFS in HER-2–positive breast cancer
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National Harbor, Md. — Women with HER2-positive breast cancer who evidenced high Tyrosine 1248-phosphorylated HER2 levels had poorer 5-year DFS compared with patients who expressed lower levels, according to a presenter at the ASCO 2010 Breast Cancer Symposium.
“In HER2-positive breast cancer patients, high expression of pHER2 was associated with a lower rate of 5-year DFS than with low expression of pHER2 in the derivation subset,” Naoki Hayashi, MD, visiting scientist in the breast medical oncology-research department at The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, said.
Researchers obtained tumor samples for the derivation set from 162 patients who underwent surgical resection for primary invasive carcinoma at M.D. Anderson from 1992 to 2007. The validation set (n=227) came from patients treated at the Hospital Clinico Universitario de Valencia in Valencia, Spain.
In the derivation set, of 26 patients with high levels of HER-2 expression, 73.8% were HER-2–positive and 26.2% were HER2-negative. Of 136 patients with low HER2 expression, 5.1% were HER-2–positive and 94.9% were HER-2-negative.
Hayashi and colleagues classified 65.3% of patients having high Tyr1248-phosphorylated HER-2 (pHER-2) expression and 34.7% as having low pHER-2 expression. In the validation set, 11.5% of high HER-2 patients had high pHER-2 expression and 88.5% had low pHER-2 expression.
High expression of pHER-2 (HR=5.7; 95% CI, 1.25-25.7) was the only significant predictor for poorer DFS in multivariate analysis. He added that difference between high and low expression of pHER2 tumor status was marginal when estimating DFS rate in the validation cohort (57.1% vs. 84.5%). – by Jason Harris
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