Abstract
INTRODUCTION: The aim of this retrospective, observational, descriptive study was to identify predictors of response to neoadjuvant therapy in breast cancer patients and to validate them using three anatomopathological scores, such as residual cancer burden (RCB) score, Chevallier system, and tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TIL) score. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We conducted a study on 88 female patients aged 37 to 78 years with confirmed breast cancer who were indicated for neoadjuvant chemotherapy. We analyzed different individual variables (such as age, menarche, and menopause), clinical/imaging characteristics of the breast tumor and axillary nodes, immunohistochemical biomarkers (such as ER/PR/HER2 and Ki67), and histopathological features (such as subtype and grading) in relation to three anatomopathological scores calculated based on the surgical resection specimen. RESULTS: The percentage of patients who could have benefited from conservative surgery increased from 6% at the time of diagnosis to 20% post-primary systemic therapy (PST). Age under 49 (p = 0.01), premenopausal status (p < 0.01), no special type (NST) (p = 0.04), high Ki67 (p < 0.01), triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) (p = 0.02) are positive predictive factors of neoadjuvant therapy, while lobular/mixt carcinoma-type (p = 0.04), luminal A (p = 0.01), positive lymph node (p < 0.01), and low differentiation grade (p = 0.01) are negative predictive factors for the response to PST. CONCLUSION: There is a strong correlation between the RCB score and the Chevallier system for quantifying the response to PST, with most predictive factors being confirmed through appropriate statistical analysis for both. TIL score values correlated with only some of the predictors, most likely due to the importance of calculating this score on both biopsy specimens at diagnosis and resection specimens after chemotherapy.