Clinical Diagnostic Value of Cytokeratin 19 In Breast Cancer

Breast cancer is the most prevalent cause of cancer death in women worldwide. The increasing prevalence and high mortality rate of this cancer has made it necessary to understand the molecular mechanism. Axillary lymph node involvement plays a great role in 5 year survival rate. So, identifying specific biomarkers for early detection of lymph node involvement in breast cancer patients can greatly increase survival rates and treatment responses.

In this study, 54 negative sentinel lymph nodes and 106 positive sentinel lymph nodes with metastatic involvement were examined from paraffin samples. Cytokeratin 19 (CK19) was used as a marker of lymph node metastasis and its expression was assessed by Real-time PCR (qPCR) and absolute quantification.

Higher cytokeratin 19 mRNA copy number was identified in metastatic lymph nodes group (P=0.005). The area under the ROC curve (AUC) was significant with P=0.006., the specificity and sensitivity were 63% and 89%, respectively for breast cancer detection on the basis of ROC curve analyses determining the optimum cut-off 250.we demonstrated that CK 19 overexpression was significantly correlated with tumor size, lymph nodes metastasis and pathological stage

Our data indicate that simultaneous use of molecular and conventional diagnostic methods can increase the sensitivity and specificity of pathologic results and decrease the false negative cases.