Fig 1.
Breast cancer immunohistochemistry images.
Image A shows a tumor with GATA-3 positive cancer cells (nuclear staining marked with a red arrow). Image B illustrates a GATA-3 negative tumor where cell nuclei (blue arrow) show no GATA-3 staining. Images C-E show immunohistochemistry for M2-macrophage specific marker CD163 used for detecting M2-macrophages (red arrow) and scoring macrophage infiltration. Images C, D, and E illustrate No/low, moderate, and high macrophage infiltration, respectively.
Fig 2.
The relation of GATA-3 indexes to macrophage infiltration and functional differentiation of breast cancer.
Panel A illustrates the distribution of GATA- 3 indexes. Panels B-G show comparisons of the GATA-3 index in relation to ER status, PR status, intrinsic subtypes, macrophage infiltration, HER-2 status, and Ki-67 index, respectively. For continuous data, one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used with a post-hoc Bonferroni’s test for comparing the means between several than two variables. Mann-Whitney test for comparing the means between two variables.
Fig 3.
ANOVA analysis followed by Bonferroni’s post hoc test comparing breast cancer Nottingham Histologic Grade (NHG) in relation to (A) GATA-3 index, (B) tumor size, (C) Ki-67 index, (D) ER index and (E) PR index. (F) Heat map of breast cancer NHG visualizes how segregated the distribution of macrophage infiltration, intrinsic subtypes, HER2 status, GATA3, ER, and PR indexes are between the NHG1, NHG2, and NHG3 tumors, respectively.
Table 1.
Patient characteristics.
Table 2.
Univariate analysis comparing Nottingham Histologic Grade (NHG) in relation to macrophage infiltration and clinical data in breast cancer.
Fig 4.
ANOVA analysis followed by Bonferroni’s post hoc test comparing macrophage infiltration in breast cancer in relation to (A) Ki-67, (B) ER, and (C) PR indexes.
Fig 5.
Kaplan-Meier curves demonstrating disease-free survival (DFS) in relation to (A) Nottingham Histologic Grade (NHG) and (B) macrophage infiltration for 83 patients with non-metastasized pT1-pT2 breast cancers treated with breast conserving surgery. In subgroup analysis, panels C and D show DFS in relation to NHG in patients having tumors with No/low and High/moderate macrophage infiltration, respectively. The comparison in this survival analysis is estimated according to the log-rank (Mantel-Cox) test.