Expression of Calretinin in Carcinoma Breast in Correlation with Various Histological and Molecular Subtypes

Abstract

Breast carcinoma is the second most common cancer following lung cancer. The incidence of cancer accounts for 24.2% and cancer death is about 15% among females. There are various prognostic and predictive factors for assessing the patient encountering carcinoma breast. Among the various prognostic factors, histological subtype and molecular subtype play a key role. The calretinin expression in carcinoma breast was seen in high-grade breast carcinomas and basal like subtype of carcinoma breast. Calretinin expression was predominantly noted in high grade II and III carcinomas as in other studies and other histological subtypes like metastatic carcinomas which are considered high grade tumours. The present study aimed to correlate the various clinicopathological parameters with the calretinin expression. The expression of Calretinin was seen mainly in grade II and grade III IDC- NST and metaplastic carcinomas. Among the molecular subtypes, the Basal like subtype and the Luminal B subtype showed calretinin expression. The calretinin expression was associated with tumours with a high proliferative index with Ki67 index >14%. This implies the importance of prognostic significance of calretinin expression, as cases with a high proliferative index are likely to have poor prognosis.