Using a dataset of 54 pregnant and 113 age/stage-matched non-pregnant breast cancer patients with complete clinical and survival data; we evaluated the pattern of hot spot somatic mutations and performed transcriptomic profiling using Sequenom® and Affymetrix®, respectively. Breast cancer molecular subtypes were defined using PAM50 and 3-Gene classifiers. We performed Gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) to evaluate pathways associated with diagnosis during pregnancy. We investigated the differential expression of cancer-related genes and published gene sets according to pregnancy. We finally investigated genes associated with disease-free survival.
Overall design
We identified 65 patients who were diagnosed with breast cancer during pregnancy. Moreover, for each case, two breast cancer patients who were not diagnosed during pregnancy or lactation, but who were matched according to age (±2 years), tumors size, nodal status, year of surgery (±2 years) and whether neoadjuvant chemotherapy was received were selected. Messenger RNA from tumor tissue has been extracted and hybridized on Affymetrix microarrays. However, due to experimental issues, 54 pregnant and 113 non-pregnant patients were remaining and used in our study.
Less...
More...