Survival of Inflammatory Breast Cancer Patients Compared to Non-inflammatory Breast Cancer Patients in Egypt

Abstract

To the Editor: Inflammatory Breast Cancer (IBC) is a rare but aggressive form of breast cancer that is diagnosed clinically (1). IBC has characteristic clinical and biologic features suggestive of differences between IBC and non-IBC. Egypt has about a five times higher proportion of IBC patients than the USA (2‐4) with distinct molecular features of IBC tumors that may reflect a more aggressive nature of the disease (5,6). Within Egypt, there have been no past comparisons between IBC and non-IBC patients with respect to survival. Therefore, as a part of this study, we decided to compare survival of IBC and non-IBC patients while taking into account, the epidemiologic, pathologic, and treatment characteristics of these two groups of patients from the National Cancer Institute of Cairo University (NCI-Cairo) in Egypt. Patients included in this study were diagnosed and treated at NCI-Cairo from 2000 to 2005. The patients included two groups, 65 IBC patients and 52 non-IBC patients. IBC diagnosis was based on the presence of erythema, edema, and peau d’orange and some of the patients in this study were included in our previous studies (5,6). We reviewed the medical records, pathology reports and radiation records, and