Clinicopathological characteristics and survival outcomes in pleomorphic lobular breast carcinoma of the breast: a SEER population-based study

The purpose of this study was to explore the clinicopathological features and survival outcome of pleomorphic lobular carcinoma (PLC) of breast, we identified 131 PLC patients and 460,109 invasive ductal carcinoma (IDC) patients in the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Result (SEER) database. PLCs presented with increased lymph node involvement, older age, higher AJCC stage and grade, and lower median survival months (PLC 84 +/- 51.03 vs. IDC 105.2 +/- 64.39 P<0.01). Compared to IDC patients, PLC patients were more inclined to be treated with mastectomy. In univariate analysis, PLC patients showed a worse disease-specific survival (DSS) than that of IDC patients (hazard ratio=0.691, 95% confidence interval 0.534-0.893, P<0.01). In multivariate analysis, we took into account other prognostic factors and found that the histology types were no longer an independent prognostic factor (P=0.120). DSS have no difference between matched IDC and PLC groups (P=0.615). This result may be due to PLCs presenting higher tumor stage, higher tumor grade, and higher rate of LN metastasis than IDCs. Our conclusion is that PLC and IDC have many different characteristics, but there is not enough difference on the DSS.