The clinical relevance of apocrine morphology in breast cancer depends on the estrogen receptor status
Kei Kawashima, Masanori Oshi, Akimitsu Yamada, Kazutaka Narui, Zunairah Shah, Thaer Khoury, Itaru Endo, Kazuaki Takabe · 2026
Read The clinical relevance of apocrine morphology in breast cancer depends on the estrogen receptor status by Kei Kawashima, Masanori Oshi, Akimitsu Yamada, Kazutaka Narui, Zunairah Shah, Thaer Khoury, Itaru Endo, Kazuaki Takabe (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-13562696.txt.
Description
Kei Kawashima and colleagues asked whether a distinctive look under the microscope changes what breast cancer means for a patient. Apocrine morphology, cells resembling sweat-gland cells, has long been linked to unusual behaviour in hormone-negative tumours, but its role in hormone-positive disease was unclear. Combining records from 226,584 patients in the SEER registry with genomic data from 1,017 tumours in The Cancer Genome Atlas, their 2026 study tested whether estrogen receptor status changes the picture.
It does: apocrine tumours carried a better outlook when estrogen receptors were absent, but a worse outlook when they were present. The two groups also differed in growth rate, immune signals, and genome instability, and standard molecular groupings did not capture the distinction. The authors conclude that apocrine shape marks a distinct biological state whose meaning flips with hormone receptor status, a nuance that could sharpen prognosis.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Kei Kawashima, Masanori Oshi, Akimitsu Yamada, Kazutaka Narui, Zunairah Shah, Thaer Khoury, Itaru Endo, Kazuaki Takabe |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 49 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |