The prognostic importance of triple negative breast carcinoma

There is a current debate on whether triple negative breast carcinomas (estrogen receptor – ER-negative, progesterone receptor – PR-negative and HER2-negative) have a poor prognosis. Our aim in this retrospective study was to determine whether triple negative feature is a prognostic factor for disease-free survival (DFS) in 322 breast carcinoma patients, of whom 80 (24.8%) had triple negative tumor histology. In the multivariate analysis, tumor subgroup (triple vs non-triple, p < 0.0001; hazard ratio [HR], 4.2; 95% confidence interval [95%CI], 2.2–8.2) was a significant factor related to relapse, in addition to number of metastatic nodes (>4 vs ≤4, p = 0.04; HR, 1.6; 95%CI, 1.2–2.4), lymphatic vascular invasion (yes vs no, p = 0.002; HR, 2.0; 95%CI, 1.3–3.1) and HER2 (positive vs negative, p < 0.0001; HR, 5.9; 95%CI, 3.0–10.0). This result indicated that patients with triple negative histology had a poor disease-free survival and this histology was an independent significant prognostic factor for DFS.