the prognostic value of lymph node cross-sectional cancer area in node-positive breast cancer a comparison with n stage and lymph node ratio淋巴结横断面癌症的预后价值地区node-positive乳腺癌与n阶段和淋巴结比率.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Pathology Research International Volume 2012, Article ID 161964, 8 pages doi:10.1155/2012/161964 Research Article The Prognostic Value of Lymph Node Cross-Sectional Cancer Area in Node-Positive Breast Cancer: A Comparison with N Stage and Lymph Node Ratio Yanxia Li,1 Earle Holmes,1 Karan Shah,2 Kevin Albuquerque,2 2 ˘ 1 Anna Szpaderska, and C¸ agatay Ers¸ahin 1 Department of Pathology, Loyola University Medical Center, 2160 S First Avenue, Maywood, IL 60153, USA 2 Department of Surgery, Loyola University Medical Center, 2160 S First Avenue, Maywood, IL 60153, USA Correspondence should be addressed to Yanxia Li, yli6@ Received 26 April 2012; Revised 20 August 2012; Accepted 5 September 2012 Academic Editor: Gary Tse Copyright © 2012 Yanxia Li et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The number of positive axillary lymph nodes (LNs) is the only node-related factor for prognostic evaluation of breast cancer recognized by AJCC (TNM staging). However, N staging may not completely reflect LN tumor involvement due to the erroneous count of LNs in the presence of matted LNs and different tumor volume in LNs. Additionally, the positive/total LN ratio (LNR) has been shown to outperform N staging in survival prediction. In our study, to better quantify the tumor involvement of axillary LNs, we measured the cross-sectional cancer area (CSCA) of the positive LNs in 292 breast cancer patients diagnosed between 1998 and 2000 in our institution and compared its prognostic value to that of number of positive LNs (metL