A retrospective study of inflammatory breast cancer patients from seven hospitals in the United Kingdom.

e11062 Background: Inflammatory breast cancer (IBC) is an aggressive form of locally advanced breast cancer characterised by rapidly progressive breast erythema, pain and tenderness, oedema and paeu d’orange. It is estimated that between 1-4 % of all newly diagnosed breast cancer patients in the United Kingdom have IBC. Methods: We retrospectively identified 51 patients who were treated for IBC at 7 hospitals in the West midlands area of the United Kingdom between 1997 and 2011. Data including patients’ demographics, clinical, radiological and histopathological characteristics were collected from electronic clinical records. The test for HER-2 over-expression was not carried out routinely before 2002, therefore HER-2 status of such patients were assessed retrospectively on the archived tissues. A cox regression analysis was used for statistical assessment of survival and prognostic factors. Results: Median age at diagnosis was 55 years (range 34-83 yrs). Median overall (OS) and progression free survival (PFS) were 32 months (range 7-97 months) and 27 months (range 2-53 months) respectively. The 3–year survival rate for the entire cohort was 32%. Majority of patients were ER and HER-2 positive (49% and 52% respectively). The rate of complete pathological response (pCR) after neoadjuvant chemotherapy was 14%. All cases who had achieved pCR were HER-2 positive who had received anti HER-2 treatment during the neoadjuvant chemotherapy. The OS for the HER-2 positive patients with pCR was not statistically different from the whole cohort (49 vs 32 months, p=0.09) or from the patients with residual disease (49 vs 26 months, p=0.13). Although the triple negative IBC patients consisted 20% of the cohort, no patients in this group had achieved pCR. The OS and PFS for the triple negative patients were 20 and 14 months respectively. Although the rate of pCR was higher in patients treated with taxane compared to those treated with anthracycline containing chemotherapy (35% vs 7%), there was no significant difference in OS between either of these regimens (29 vs 27 months). Conclusions: HER-2 positive IBC patients had higher rate of achieving pCR after neo-adjuvant anti HER-2 therapy. However higher rate of pCR did not improve the OS.