Clinical Significance of Lymphatic Vessel Density in Breast Cancer

Objective To investigate the lymphatic vessel density(LVD)and its clinical significance in breast cancer.Methods Immunohistochemistry was used to detect the expression of LYVE-1 in the tissues from 100 patients with breast cancer tissues and 20 patients with breast fibroadenoma.Lymphatic vessel density(LVD)was counted,and the correlation between the LVD and lymph node metastasis and other clinicopathological parameters was then analyzed.Results LVD was significantly higher in the tissues from breast cancer than that from breast fibroadenoma(P0.01).In breast cancer,LVD in the sample with lymphatic metastasis was significantly higher than that in the sample without lymphatic metastasis(P0.01).There were no correlation between the LVD and age,tumor size,ER,PR,c-erbB2(P0.05),but LVD was significantly correlated with histological grade(P0.01).Conclusion LVD is significantly correlated with breast cancer lymphatic metastasis.LVD may serve as a biologic marker for lymphatic metastasis in breast cancer.