Abstract:
Objective: To find the association between delayed diagnosis of breast cancer over the degree of invasiveness for each
of the immune-histochmically defined molecular type of invasive ductal carcinoma among the patient in tertiary care
hospital of Karachi.
Study Design and Setting: A cross sectional study was conducted on 153 post mastectomy patients in a time frame of
two years at Bait-ul-Sukoon Hospital who had their immunohistochemistry workup.
Methodology: The patients included in the research were diagnosed cases of breast cancer; had post-mastectomy with
their histopathological and immunochemistry status work up reports. In addition to demographic variables; the histopathological
report of specimen, histological tumor type and grade, invasive tumor size, axillary lymph node status, Paget’s disease and
stage of the disease were recorded from the histopathological report however ER, PR and Her 2 neu receptor statuses were
confirmed via immunochemistry report. Volume of the tumor was calculated using the following formula V = (W2 × L)/2
Convenient sampling was applied and the data was analyzed on SPSS 20.0 with CI-95% and P=0.05.
Results- All 153 patients reported because of unpleasant symptoms.47.1% of the participants presented with LT while the
remaining 52.9% were grouped as NLT. The association of molecular type with stage at mastectomy was statistically
significant (P=0.015) in the ERG. Her-2 enriched variant shows that there was a moderate positive statistically significant
relationship between log of total delay and log of tumor volume +2.
Conclusion: Delay in diagnosis due to lack of screening modalities, lesser awareness among low socioeconomic groups
and inaccessibility to tertiary care were not the major causes of aggressive tumors at diagnosis in developing countries,
instead all the major known risk factors influence to the tumor burden collectively .