Investigate the prognostic values of Telomerase expression in breast cancer

Abstract

Background: Several studies have shown up-regulated telomerase activities to be linked to poor prognosis, survival of cancer cells, cancer progression and may also increase drug resistance of breast cancer, however, our understanding of telomerase activity in breast cancer remain limited. Aim of work: to investigate the role of telomerase expression in breast cancer prognosis. Furthermore, the association between telomerase expression and with other parameters including tumor features including: clinicopathology parameters disease outcome, disease recurrence and hormone receptor status was assessed. Objective: the current study is to examine the association between telomerase expression and survival to evaluate the current state of knowledge concerning the value of telomerase expression as a prognostic factor. METHODS: A 63 women (patients) above 18 years old eligible pathologically proven with metastatic breast cancer presenting to Oncology Clinic of Baheya Cancer Center during duration of study were enrolled in this study. All patients were scheduled to receive adjuvant treatment after surgical interference. The data will be extracted from Electronic Medical Records into a designed standard clinical data sheet. Including clinical and pathological characteristic of study population, Telomerase expression test is done by collecting Blood sample at end of experiment according to hospital protocol (for serum sample). RNA extraction by commercially available kits (RT-PCR) hTERT detection (to detect positive &negative results). Only sample clearly positive twice were scored as positive. The test done in Baheya hospital lab. Statistical analysis of result by fisher’s exact test and Wilcoxon rank-sum test. Result: Clinical and pathological characteristics of the study population revealed that about 76% of patients with age raged from (41-70) years old and about 67% of patient had BMI of ( 31- above 40 kg\m2 ).while (34.92%) of patients were PR+ER (+ve) and 12.69% were HER2 (+ve).Moreover 41.5% of patients received both chemotherapy and hormonal therapy .In addition, telomerase expression was detected in …….. % of patients which tended to. Conclusion: telomerase expression might reserve as a good target for breast cancer treatment and prognosis. Telomerase expression could be useful as biomarker for evaluation of breast cancer and enzyme might serve as good target for anticancer drug.