Balázs Ács, Associate Professor at Karolinska Institutet, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“Beyond ER-positive vs ER-negative: Describing the estrogen receptor expression spectrum in breast cancer
Following our recent Lancet Oncology papers, I am delighted to share that our new study has now been published in the high impact The Lancet Regional Health – Europe journal. This work is a collaboration between Karolinska Institutet and Karolinska University Hospital.
It was a true honor for me to lead this study and to explore an important and often overlooked question: how outcomes vary across the entire spectrum of estrogen receptor (ER) expression in HER2-negative breast cancer using a nationwide cohort of 75,211 patients with HER2-negative breast cancer.
Key findings:
- ER expression behaves as acontinuum rather than a binary biomarker.
- Patients with ER 10–29% (ER-mild) tumors had survival outcomes and molecular characteristics remarkably similar to ER-low and ER-zero disease.
- Both ER-mild (10–29%) and ER-moderate (30–59%) tumors had significantly worse survival than strongly ER-positive tumors (ER ≥60%).
- For ER-mild and ER-moderate tumors, chemotherapy plus endocrine therapy was associated with better survival than endocrine therapy alone.
These findings support more nuanced reporting of ER expression and suggest that the traditional ER-positive/ER-negative classification may not fully capture the biological and clinical diversity of breast cancer. Better recognition of these ER subgroups may ultimately lead to more individualized treatment recommendations and more accurate discussions regarding prognosis for our patients.
Congratulations to all authors on this work, especially our shared first authors Qiao Yang and Ceren Boyaci!”
Title: Patient characteristics, treatment patterns, and survival across estrogen receptor expression subgroups in HER2-negative breast cancer: a population-based cohort study
Authors: Qiao Yang, Ceren Boyaci, Ioannis Zerdes, Irma Fredriksson, Xinsong Chen, Johan Hartman, Balazs Acs
Read the Full Article on The Lancet Regional Health – Europe
Other posts featuring Balázs Ács on OncoDaily.