Retrospective review of steroid-induced acne in patients with breast cancer.

Abstract

e12570 Background: With the rapid development of targeted inhibitors, the incidence of cutaneous chemotoxicities is rising and represents a significant cause of morbidity in cancer patients. Therefore, rapid recognition of rashes that warrant dose reduction or discontinuing treatment is critical. Unfortunately, the concomitant use of systemic steroids with chemotherapeutics that can produce acneiform eruptions, make it difficult to distinguish a cutaneous chemotoxicity from systemic steroid induced acne (SSIA). Although SSIA is a well known complication of systemic steroid administration, there are few published studies regarding this condition, none of which have been done in cancer patients. In this study, we sought to examine the incidence of SSIA, the patient and tumor characteristics as well as the chemotherapy regimen most commonly associated with SSIA in breast cancer patients treated with chemotherapy at the City of Hope National Comprehensive Cancer Center. Methods: We performed a retrospective study. Using the institutional registry of patients, we identified 3,848 patients that received a diagnosis of breast cancer between 1/2009-6/2015, 1,991 (51%) of which received at least one cycle of chemotherapy. 61 of these patients received a ICD-9 billing code for “acne” or “ steroid acne”, 10 of whom had explicit documentation of acne or acneiform eruption in their chart. Results: All 10 patients were female with a median age of 49 (range 36-56). 50% of patients had ER+/PR+ disease and 30% had ER-/PR-/HER2- breast cancer. 90% of patients had stage I or II disease. 70% of patients developed steroid induced acne after the 1st cycle of chemotherapy. All regimens contained either docetaxel or paclitaxel. Dexamethasone was implicated in all but one case. We report an overall incidence of SSIA of 0.05% among breast cancer patients treated with at least once cycle of chemotherapy at our institution. Conclusions: These results suggest that breast cancer patients at highest risk for SSIA are on taxane-based regimens with early stage disease and are most likely to develop the reaction after their first cycle of chemotherapy. This study however is limited by the retrospective design, the reliance on ICD 9 billing codes, and the limited sample size.