Sono i recettori endocrini determinanti per la prognosi del carcinoma della mammella?

The capacity of hormone receptors to predict sensitivity to hormone therapy in breast cancer has been demonstrated since many years; on the other hand, its importance in the prognosis of these patients, expressed as disease-free survival (DFS) or overall survival (OS), is still discussed. The authors have reviewed the literature data on this problem, paying particular attention to studies homogeneous for disease extent and therapeutic approaches (surgical or post-surgical). At the moment of mastectomy, the presence of estrogen or progesterone receptors in primary tumors was not clearly related to the patients' DFS. The higher probability of DFS was observed in the group of patients who received adjuvant hormone therapy after mastectomy, with increasing amounts of each receptor in primary tumors and when both hormone receptors were contemporaneously present. In patients with breast carcinoma, the data on the relationship between hormone receptors and overall survival were more homogeneous: the presence of the cellular hormone receptor improves the probability to have a longer OS in patients treated by radical mastectomy. The opportunity to analyze these relationships in some reports which processed a statistical multivariate analysis permits us to confirm the hormone receptor values also as a prognostic parameter which is not dependent from other (axillary lymph nodes involvement, tumor size and therapy) till now considered parameters.