EXPRESSION OF ANDROGEN RECEPTOR IN THAI BREAST CANCER PATIENTS

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Introduction
In 2008, there were approximately 1,380,000 cases of female breast cancer worldwide (1, 2). According to the American Society of cancer the trend of female breast cancer are increasing. The approximate number of female breast cancer in US in 2013 was 232,340 cases (account for 29% of all female cancer in US) (3). In Thailand, there was approximate number of 12,000 new female breast cancer cases per year (4). Thus breast cancer is still one of the most important female cancers.
It is a consensus that breast cancer is systemic disease. Multimodality treatment is needed to cure from the residual cancer after the surgery (5-11). Three well established systemic treatments for breast cancer are chemotherapy, hormonal therapy, and biological targeted therapy. Systemic chemotherapy claims to have high effective against breast cancer, but it can cause serious side effects in the patients (12, 13). Unlike chemotherapy, hormonal treatment (one of biological targeted therapy) has fewer side effects, but the tumors need to express hormonal receptors in their cells (8, 14). Up to date, there are two kinds of hormonal treatment for breast cancer; anti-estrogen receptor drug (eg. Tamoxifen) (15-17) and aromatase inhibitors (eg. Letrozole) (10, 18, 19). Biological targeted therapy is a new way to flight against breast cancer, but the cost is still very high. Even the effective systemic treatment, breast cancer still has the high death rate. According to US cancer fact sheet death rate was about one-fifth of the cases in 2013 (3).
The morbidity and mortality is higher in triple negative breast cancer, which is hormonal receptors negative ontology (20, 21). Chemotherapy and biological targeted therapy are two systemic tr...

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... advance stage breast cancer as study by de Matteis, et al. and Scholl A. (41, 42) or treat skin metastasis by Battelli, et al.(43). Androgen may be a new target for breast cancer treatment on the future (44).

Conclusion
The prevalence of androgen receptors in Thai breast cancer patients was 80.00% and less expression in triple negative breast cancer patients (33.33%). The androgen may be a new target therapy for Thai breast cancer patients who had highly expressed of androgen receptors. The Thai triple negative breast cancer had lower androgen expression than previously report by western countries. The hormonal status (ER/PR) was strongly related to the androgen receptor expression; on the opposite way, triple negative ontology trend to had lower androgen receptor expression. For this finding, androgen expression may relate to the prognosis of the breast tumors.

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