Published in:
01-06-2015 | Gynecologic Oncology
Personal or first-degree family breast cancer history: which has higher impact on tumor detection and tumor size in breast cancer
Published in: Archives of Gynecology and Obstetrics | Issue 6/2015
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Purpose
A woman’s risk of developing breast cancer (BC) is increased if she has a personal history (PH) or family history (FH) of the disease. We compared the impact of the two risk factors PH and FH on tumor detection and tumor size at diagnosis in a cohort of BC patients.
Methods
The study cohort comprised 1,037 invasive BC patients (≤70 years at diagnosis). From these, 92 patients (8.5 %) had a positive PH and 151 patients (13.7 %) had a positive first-degree FH.
Results
Compared to the tumors of patients without PH or FH, the lesions of patients who had a positive PH or a positive FH were more often found by radiologic breast examinations (RBE) (PH: 49.4 %, FH: 43.4 %, no PH/FH: 26.2 %; both comparisons p < 0.001). In patients with a positive FH, the tumors were slightly less often found by RBE as in patients with a positive PH (p = 0.468). Patients with a positive PH or FH had smaller tumors compared with those without such a history (PH: 19.7 mm, FH: 19.6 mm, no PH/FH: 26.7 mm; p = 0.015/p < 0.001). The tumor sizes of patients with a positive PH were almost identical to those of patients with a positive FH (p = 0.999).
Conclusions
In women with a positive FH or PH of BC, the increased awareness of BC risk led to the detection of smaller tumors compared to women who have not had this experience. However, comparison of the two risk factors showed that they had a similar impact on the RBE detection rate of BC lesions and that the tumor sizes were nearly identical.