Role of Nuclear Factor-κB in female Breast Cancer: A Study in Indian Patients

Introduction: The nuclear factor κB (NF-κB) is a super family of transcription factors which plays importantroles in development and progression of cancer. The present investigation concerns NF-κB /p65 activity in humanbreast cancers with overexpression of ER, PR, HER-2/neu, as well as the significance of p65 expression withregard to menopausal status, stage, grade, tumor size, nodal status, and NPI of invasive ductal carcinomas inEastern India. Materials and
Methods: In this hospital based study 57 breast cancer patients attending a BreastClinic of a reputed institute of Eastern India were assessed for p65 protein expression in breast tumor tissuesamples by Western blotting. ER, PR and HER-2/neu expression was determined by immunohistochemistry.
Results: NF-κB/p65 was significantly associated with advanced stage, large tumor size (≥5 cm), high grade,negative ER, negative PR, and positive HER-2/neu. High NF-κB/p65 expression was more frequent in patientswith a high NPI (NPI ≥ 5.4, 84.6%) compared with low NPI (<5.4, 44.4%) and this association was statisticallysignificant (p = 0.002).
Conclusion: NF-κB/p65 overexpression was associated with advanced stage, large tumorsize, high grade, and high NPI which are poor prognostic factors linked to enhanced aggressiveness of thedisease. NF-κB/p65 expression implies aggressive biological behavior of breast cancer and this study validatessignificant association of NF-κB /p65 overexpression with negative estrogen and progesterone receptor status andoverexpression of HER-2/neu oncoprotein. In our good clinical practice, patients with NF-κB positive tumorsneed to be treated aggressively.