What is breast cancer heterogeneity?

Breast cancer is a highly heterogeneous disease that can be caused by a variety of distinct genetic alterations in mammary epithelial cells, leading to vastly different disease manifestations in individual patients.

What does heterogeneous mean in cancer?

Tumour heterogeneity describes differences between tumours of the same type in different patients, and between cancer cells within a tumour. Both can lead to different responses to therapy.

What is heterogeneous in the breast?

A term used to describe breast tissue that has large areas of dense fibrous tissue and glandular tissue and also has some fatty tissue. The dense areas of the breast make it harder to find tumors or other changes on a mammogram.

What is heterogeneous mass in breast?

Benign breast diseases constitute a heterogeneous group of lesions arising in the mammary epithelium or in other mammary tissues, and they may also be linked to vascular, inflammatory or traumatic pathologies. Most lesions found in women consulting a physician are benign.

What is the best type of breast cancer to have?

Pure mucinous ductal carcinoma carries a better prognosis than more common types of IDCs. Papillary Carcinoma – This is a very good prognosis breast cancer that primarily occur in women over the age of 60.

What are the two types of breast cancer?

The most common types are invasive ductal carcinoma and invasive lobular carcinoma. Invasive ductal carcinoma makes up about 70-80% of all breast cancers.

Can a heterogeneous mass be benign?

Soft tissue tumors are a heterogeneous group of benign and malignant lesions that develop from various nonepithelial, extraskeletal elements, including adipose tissue, smooth and skeletal muscle, tendon, cartilage, fibrous tissue, blood vessels, and lymphatic structures.

Why are breast cancer tumors so heterogeneous?

Such aggressiveness of breast cancer may be due to the known heterogeneity of breast tumors [ 3 ]. One of the ways to determine cancer heterogeneity may be the identification of different cell phenotypes, cell density, or their localization in the tumor.

Why is intratumor heterogeneity important in cancer treatment?

This intratumor heterogeneity is the tumor’s ability to adapt to the new microenvironment conditions. Thus, tumor specimen taken during a biopsy does not necessarily represent the real tumor composition, because the tumor may consist of phenotypically different cancer cell populations with different properties and resistance to drugs.

Is the treatment of TNBC associated with heterogeneity?

The complicated treatment of TNBC can be associated with tumor heterogeneity. Nowadays, the TNBC classification into several different molecular TNBC subtypes is well known. Each molecular subtype has a different behavior of disease and response to treatment [ 8, 9 ].

What are the four subtypes of breast cancer?

These analyzes resulted in a molecular classification of breast cancers distinguishing four subtypes: Luminal A, Luminal B, HER 2+ and basal like. This variability may be observed between the primary tumor and metastases, namely the temporal intratumor heterogeneity.