Background: To study the impact of inflammatory cells in a clinically well-defined cohort of women with node-negative breast cancer in a nested case-control study design.
Material and methods: The cohort was comprised of 190 women who died from breast cancer and 190 women still alive at the date of death for the corresponding breast cancer patients were used as controls. The inclusion criteria included; a tumour size ≤ 50 mm, no lymph node metastases and no initiation of adjuvant chemotherapy. Immunohistochemical stainings for CD3, CD4, CD8, FoxP3, CD20, tryptase and CD68 were performed on TMA blocks, evaluated and correlated to each other and to age, tumour size, histological grade, ER, PgR, Ki67 and cyclin A.
Results: There was no difference regarding the amount or content of inflammatory cells in the cases compared to controls. T- and B-cells were highly correlated to each other but these cell types correlated to a lesser extent to macrophages and not at all to mast cells. A weak tendency of correlations between all the subsets of inflammatory cells and histological grade, Ki67 and cyclin A was observed, although a negative correlation was seen for mast cells.
Conclusion: The amount or content of inflammatory cells in invasive breast cancer did not appear to influence death in node-negative breast cancer.