New prognostic markers and prognosis in various breast cancer subtypes

Breast cancer is the most common cancer among women - approximately 5 000 Finns are diagnosed with the disease yearly. In overall the prognosis of breast cancer is very good but locally advanced breast cancer is still mainly incurable. Only 50% of locally advanced breast cancer patients are alive after 5 years from the diagnosis in studied patient material of this PhD thesis. In total, 91.4% of all the breast cancer patients are alive after ten years from diagnosis.

This PhD thesis is the first Finnish study of the rare neuroendocrine breast cancers. Usually those cancers are treated the same way as the "ordinary" breast cancers, but based on this study, their biological profile is different and thus the treatment should possibly be as well. Neuroendocrine breast cancers were found to express somatostatin receptors as do some of the cancers of gastrointestinal track. Probably neuroendocrine breast cancers could be treated similarly with a drug binding to the receptor. This, nevertheless, needs more studies before the actual use of the drug.