Abstract
As women age, the lobules in their breasts undergo involution. We have shown that, in women with benign breast disease, progressive involution assessed near the benign lesion is associated with lower breast cancer risk. However, it is unknown whether the extent of involution is variable or uniform across the entire breast. We compared involution across the four quadrants of both breasts for fifteen women undergoing bilateral prophylactic mastectomy. One pathologist classified involution extent as none (0% involuted lobules), mild (1–24%), moderate (25–74%), or complete (≥75%). We assessed intra-woman concordance using intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs), kappa coefficients, and pairwise comparisons of agreement. We found strong intra-woman concordance of involution across the eight quadrants of breast tissue (ICC = 0.75, 95% CI 0.59, 0.89). Our study suggests that lobular involution is a homogeneous process, supporting the use of involution measures from a single benign biopsy as a component in breast cancer risk assessment paradigms.
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Acknowledgements
We are indebted to Teresa Allers, Romayne Thompson, Joanne Johnson, Melanie Kasner, and Mary Campion for data collection; to Shaun Maloney for database design and data management; to Tia Milanese for initial study set-up; to Ann Hart for tissue requests and tracking; and to Vicki Shea for help in preparing the manuscript. Supported by a Department of Defense Center of Excellence Grant (FEDDAMD17-02-1-0473-1), a grant (R01 CA46332) from the National Institutes of Health, and grants from Martha and H. Bruce Atwater Jr. and the Regis Foundation for Breast Cancer Research.
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Vierkant, R.A., Hartmann, L.C., Pankratz, V.S. et al. Lobular involution: localized phenomenon or field effect?. Breast Cancer Res Treat 117, 193–196 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10549-008-0082-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10549-008-0082-6