Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Wang, Chun
• Mu, Zhaomei
• Chervoneva, Inna
• Austin, Laura
• Ye, Zhong
• Rossi, Giovanna
• Palazzo, Juan P.
• Sun, Carl
• Abu-Khalaf, Maysa
• Myers, Ronald E.
• Zhu, Zhu
• Ba, Yanna
• Li, Bingshan
• Hou, Lifang
• Cristofanilli, Massimo
• Yang, Hushan

Titel

Longitudinally collected CTCs and CTC-clusters and clinical outcomes of metastatic breast cancer

Ist Teil von

• Breast cancer research and treatment, 2017-01, Vol.161 (1), p.83-94

Ort / Verlag

New York: Springer US

Erscheinungsjahr

2017

Quelle

MEDLINE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Purpose Circulating tumor cell (CTC) is a well-established prognosis predictor for metastatic breast cancer (MBC), and CTC-cluster exhibits significantly higher metastasis-promoting capability than individual CTCs. Because measurement of CTCs and CTC-clusters at a single time point may underestimate their prognostic values, we aimed to analyze longitudinally collected CTCs and CTC-clusters in MBC prognostication. Methods CTCs and CTC-clusters were enumerated in 370 longitudinally collected blood samples from 128 MBC patients. The associations between baseline, first follow-up, and longitudinal enumerations of CTCs and CTC-clusters with patient progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS) were analyzed using Cox proportional hazards models. Results CTC and CTC-cluster counts at both baseline and first follow-up were significantly associated with patient PFS and OS. Time-dependent analysis of longitudinally collected samples confirmed the significantly unfavorable PFS and OS in patients with ≥5 CTCs, and further demonstrated the independent prognostic values by CTC-clusters compared to CTC-enumeration alone. Longitudinal analyses also identified a link between the size of CTC-clusters and patient OS: compared to the patients without any CTC, those with 2-cell CTC-clusters and ≥3-cell CTC-clusters had a hazard ratio (HR) of 7.96 [95 % confidence level (CI) 2.00–31.61, P  = 0.003] and 14.50 (3.98–52.80, P  < 0.001), respectively. Conclusions In this novel time-dependent analysis of longitudinally collected CTCs and CTC-clusters, we showed that CTC-clusters added additional prognostic values to CTC enumeration alone, and a larger-size CTC-cluster conferred a higher risk of death in MBC patients.