Demographic, clinical, pathological, molecular, treatment characteristics and outcomes of nonmetastatic inflammatory breast cancer in Morocco: 2007 and 2008

We analyze the epidemiological characteristics and outcomes of 72 patients diagnosed with non-metastatic inflammatory breast cancer (IBC) at National Institute of Oncology of Rabat in Morocco, between January 2007 and December 2008. IBC patients represent 5% of all breast cancers (90/1800). The median age of patients was 47 years. Thirty eight patients (53%) had premenoposal status and 69% of the cases had clinical lymph nodes. The dominant pathological funding was infiltrating ductal carcinoma (96%). Most patients had high grade II/III (77.8%), 43.4% of the cases were ER negative and 47.4% of the tumors overexpress the HER2/neu receptor on IHC. Only 48.6% of the patients received completed treatment (chemotherapy [CT], surgery and radiotherapy [RT]) and all patients received anthracycline based neoadjuvant CT, 51.4% of whom received Taxane. Seventy one% of the patients underwent surgery and 54% received RT. The clinical response to CT was 68%. Only 1 (1.4%) patient has pathological complete response (pCR) in the breast and 5 (7%) had pathologically negative lymph-nodes. Patient who achieved pCR was disease free at 27 months. LRRFS, EFS and OS rates at 1–2 years were 90.8%-78.1%, 81.7%-57.5%, and 94.3%-74.6%, respectively. Patients with ER-negative status (EFS: P = 0.043) had poorer outcomes and RT was associated with highly significant increase in LRRFS, EFS and OS (P < 0.0001, P < 0.001 and P = 0.017).