Inflammatory mediators in breast cancer: Coordinated expression of TNFα & IL-1β with CCL2 & CCL5 and effects on epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition

Table 3 TNFα and IL-1β prevalence in tumors of breast cancer patients

Cytokine	Group No.	Group name	% Positive cells in tumors (X ± SD)	Score (X ± SD)
TNFα	I	DCIS	67.3 ± 24.7	134.8 ± 82.4
	II	IDC-no-relapse	65.9 ± 23.7	141.9 ± 81.1
	III	IDC-with-relapse	85.0 ± 6.8	191.0 ± 70.3
		p value	0.0008	0.0331
IL-1β	I	DCIS	69.3 ± 21.6	117.6 ± 80.1
	II	IDC-no-relapse	55.7 ± 29.3	121.2 ± 96.5
	III	IDC-with-relapse	84.8 ± 11.5	206.2 ± 76.2
		p value	<0.0001	0.0004

The table provides information on the prevalence of TNFα and IL-1β expression in tumors of breast cancer patients, with analyses that were performed only on patients whose tumors expressed the cytokines: DCIS group = Group I: TNFα n = 15, IL-1β n = 18; IDC-no-relapse group = Group II: TNFα n = 17, IL-1β n = 15; IDC-with-relapse group = Group III: TNFα n = 29, IL-1β n = 31. Each of the TNFα- and IL-1β-positive tumors were analyzed for % positive cells in the tumors, intensity of expression of the cytokines, and score (as described in "Methods"). The table provides the X ± SD of % cells positive for TNFα and IL-1β, and the X ± SD of the expression scores of TNFα and IL-1β in the three groups of patients.
For each cytokine, group means were compared by one-way analysis of variance. Whenever a significant effect of group was observed, pair-wise comparisons between groups were performed. The results of the statistical analyses have shown that: (1) For % TNFα-positive cells, p = 0.0008: Group III was statistically different from Groups I and II. (2) For TNFα score, p = 0.0331: Paired comparisons did not identify specific significant differences between the groups of patients. (3) For % IL-1β positive cells, p < 0.0001: All three groups were statistically different from each other. (4) For IL-1β score, p = 0.0004: Group III was statistically different from Groups I and II.

ISSN: 1471-2407