Detection of disseminated tumor cells in bone marrow predict late recurrences in operable breast cancer patients

BMC Cancer

Table 3 Multivariable Cox regression of systemic recurrence-free survival and breast cancer-specific survival demonstrate that pre-operative DTC status is an independent prognostic factor for prediction of late recurrences (> 5 years) in operable breast cancer patients (n = 155). Median follow-up was 15.3 years

	Parameter	Hazard ratio	95% CI	p-value
Systemic recurrence-free survival	Pre-operative DTC status (pos. vs neg.)	3.27	1.314–8.149	0.011
	MAI status (high vs low)	0.22	0.051–0.953	0.043
	LN status (N1 and N2 vs N0)	2.30	0.969–5.443	0.059
Breast cancer–specific survival	Pre-operative DTC status (pos. vs neg.)	3.58	1.35–12.370	0.044
Breast cancer–specific survival	LN status (N1 and N2 vs N0)	3.19	0.973–10.499	0.056

Patients with early recurrence (< 5 years) were excluded from these analyses to verify the significance of DTC detection for prediction of late disease recurrences. Only results from backward stepwise selection of variables are presented.
p-value ≤0.05 are in bold

ISSN: 1471-2407