Journal of Clinical Oncology, Vol 1, 349-358, Copyright © 1983 by American Society of Clinical Oncology
Breast cancer estrogen and progesterone receptor values: their distribution, degree of concordance, and relation to number of positive axillary nodes
B Fisher, DL Wickerham, A Brown and CK Redmond
Increasing evidence indicates the importance of ascertaining the
quantitative estrogen receptor (ER) and progesterone receptor (PR) content
(in femtomoles per milligram cytosol protein) of primary breast cancers.
Those values obtained from the tumors of 1,887 patients participating in
National Surgical Adjuvant Breast and Bowel Project protocol B-09 have been
analyzed to define (1) the distribution of tumor ER or PR according to
patient age, (2) the distribution of tumor PR within a specific ER
interval, and (3) the concordance of tumor ER and PR levels. The present
findings indicate how predictive the knowledge of the amount of one
receptor (e.g., ER) may be for estimating the amount of the other (PR),
when the latter is unknown.
