Expression of Bcl-2 Gene in Primary Breast Cancer and its Correlation with Some Prognostic Factors

Background and The breast cancer is the most common malignancy in women. Bcl-2 expression has been determined in more than half of the cases of breast cancer. The purpose of this study was to determine the expression of bcl-2 gene in primary breast cancer and its correlation with grade, stage and axillary lymph node involvement. The study was a cross-sectional one that was performed on 75 patients with breast cancer admitted to Mostafa Khomeini hospital (2000-2005). After preparing the samples, a tissue section from each sample was obtained. One of the tumoral sections and one of the lymph node sections were stained using H & E. We determined the type of the tumor, the number of lymph nodes, the stage and the grade of the tumor. We studied Bcl-2 with polyclonal antibody by IHC. Our study showed that 69.3% of patients had hymph node involvment. In addition, 41.3% of samples were positive for Bcl-2, 58.7% of samples were in stage II and many patients (42.7%) were in grade III. In this study, we didn’t find any relationship between bcl-2 and stage and lymph node involvment. We also found a significant association between bcl-2 and grade (P<0.006). Also, high bcl-2 expression was more frequent in high-grade tumor. According to the results obtained from earlier studies and our study, it seems that bcl2 is a prognostic factor in breast cancer. But further investigations with more specimens and long-time follow-up are required to clarify the exact role of Bcl-2 in the prognosis of breast cancer.