ABSTRACT

Background: Breast cancer is a heterogeneous disease, though little is known about some of its rarer forms, including certain histologic types. We aim to assess the relationship between the different histologic types of breast cancer and various tumor parameters.

Objectives: To determine the prevalence of histological subtypes of breast cancer and its association with age, molecular subtype, menopausal status, parity, obesity and tumor grade.

Methodology: A prospective, observational study was conducted at Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Center, Karachi, Pakistan from April 2018 to September 2019. The Chi-Square test was used to find the association of histological subtypes with age, molecular subtype, menopausal status, parity, obesity, grade of tumor among breast cancer patients.

Results: We report a prevalence of 91.3% of Invasive Ductal Carcinoma IDC (NOS) among women in our setting. The other rare types of cancer included ILC; 2%, metaplastic 1.4%, and Invasive micropapillary carcinoma; 1%. IDC (NOS) and ILC were significantly associated with luminal A type disease (p<0.05) while metaplastic was associated with basal type disease (p=0.006).

Conclusion: The most prevalent histological subtype of breast carcinoma in our study population was IDC (NOS). However various rarer variants of IDC were also reported. Histological subtypes play a pivotal role in predicting the behavior and clinical outcome of breast carcinomas. The study highlighted our population's demographic and epidemiological variations.