The Prognostic Value of Skin Involvement in Breast Cancer Patients With Chest Wall Recurrence
Abstract Background: To assess the prognosis of skin involvement in female breast cancer patients with chest wall recurrence (CWR).Methods: We retrospectively analyzed the clinical-pathological data of breast cancer patients with CWR who were diagnosed pathologically between January 2000 and April 2020. Progression free survival (PFS) was defined as time from diagnosis of CWR to the first disease progression. Persistent chest wall progression was three consecutive chest wall progression without distant organ involvement.Results: A total of 476 patients with CWR were included in this study. Among them, skin involvement or not was queried and confirmed in 345 patients. Skin involvement was significantly correlated to tumor size (P=0.003) and initial nodal status (P<0.001). By Kaplan-Meier analysis, skin involvement predicted a shorter PFS (P<0.001), especially local disease progression (P<0.001). Skin involvement was an independent biomarker for PFS by the multivariate analysis (P=0.034). Patients with skin involvement were more likely to experience persistent chest wall progression (P=0.040). After eliminating the potential deviation caused by insufficient follow-up time, persistent chest wall progression was more likely to be associated with positive lymph nodal status (P=0.046), negative PR (P=0.001) and positive HER2 (P=0.046) of the primary site, negative ER (P=0.027) and PR (P=0.013) of chest wall lesion and skin involvement (P=0.020).Conclusion: Skin involvement predicted poor local disease control in female breast cancer patients with CWR and it was more likely to be related to persistent chest wall progression. We improved the stratification of prognosis and provided new insights for biological behaviors of the disease and further individualized treatment in breast cancer patients with CWR.