Fig 1.
Design of the post-diagnostic study with definitions of the different observation times.
Table 1.
Overview of the study population (415 cases), according to breast cancer stage at the time of diagnosis.
Fig 2.
Number of significantly differentially expressed genes for each follow-up time period.
Fig 3.
Number of significantly differentially expressed genes for each follow-up time period stratified on stage of breast cancer; invasive and metastatic.
Fig 4.
Number of significantly differentially expressed genes for each follow-up time period stratified on vital status at the end of follow-up; death or survival.
Fig 5.
Heat maps with 74 selected genes in each stratum; invasive versus metastatic, and death or survival, at end of follow-up.
The 50 topmost genes in the heat maps are the 50 top genes for the metastatic cases that died, the next 19 are the significantly up-regulated or down-regulated genes for the metastatic cases that survived, and the last five are the significantly up-regulated or down-regulated genes for the invasive cases that survived. There were no significantly up-regulated or down-regulated genes for the invasive cases that died. The heat maps show log fold change for each gene (y-axis) for each quarter of the years after diagnosis (x-axis).
Table 2.
Comparison of the number of differentially expressed genes between the four strata of breast cancer cases, using using metastatic breast cancer patients that died as reference.
Fig 6.
Venn diagram for the three strata with significantly different gene expression profiles; metastatic cases who died (labeled as met died), metastatic cases who survived (met surv), and invasive cases who survived (inv surv).
Table 3.
Significant gene sets (overlap analysis, FDR<5%) among the top differentially expressed genes, in blood gene expression profiles from metastatic cases who died during follow-up, compared to controls.
Table 4.
Results from the fgsea analysis of enriched gene sets in blood gene expression profiles from metastatic cases who died during follow-up, compared to controls.
Fig 7.
Kaplan-Meier curves for death by stratum.
Kaplan-Meier plot for cases and controls in the dataset with up to 15 years of follow-up (metastasis and follow-up time information from the intitial/first breast cancer diagnosis): 52 in situ cases, 232 invasive cases, 137 metastatic cases.