Fig 1.
Representative findings of H&E staining and IHC for ER, PgR, Ki-67.
In case 1, a patient with Grade II tumour scored 95%, 15%, and 80% for ER, PgR, and Ki-67, respectively. In case 2, a patient with Grade II tumour scored 95%, 95%, and 10% for ER, PgR, and Ki-67, respectively. In case 3, a patient with Grade III tumour scored 90%, 0%, and 70% for ER, PgR, and Ki-67, respectively (magnification x400).
Table 1.
Comparison between groups in terms of clinicopathologic characteristics.
Fig 2.
Distribution of ER expression as percentage of immunoreactive cells for the PgR-positive and PgR-negative groups.
Histogram bars are in 10-unit bins, beginning with 1% of cells, 1% to 10%, 11% to 20%, etc. The ER+/PgR+/HER2- group consisted of 27 (2.3%) patients with ER <50% and 1129 (97.7%) patients with ER ≥50%. The ER+/PgR-/HER2- group consisted of 62 (16.9%) patients with ER <50% and 304 (83.1%) patients with ER ≥50%. The number of patients with a higher level of ER expression (ER ≥50%) in the ER+/PgR+/HER2- group was significantly larger that in the ER+/PgR-/HER2- group (P < 0.0001).
Fig 3.
Good overall correlation was observed between ER and PgR expression with clinicopathologic variables among ER+/PgR+/HER2- (a-l) tumours.
ER expression levels were positively correlated with age, whereas PgR expression levels were negatively correlated with age. ER and PgR expression levels were both negatively correlated with grade, size, LN status, Ki-67 and LVI.
Table 2.
Clinicopathologic characteristics in patients according to PgR and Ki-67 status.
Table 3.
Comparison between the purely negative and low PgR expression groups.