Bimodal age distribution at diagnosis in breast cancer persists across molecular and genomic classifications.

ABSTRACT:

Purpose

Female breast cancer demonstrates bimodal age frequency distribution patterns at diagnosis, interpretable as two main etiologic subtypes or groupings of tumors with shared risk factors. While RNA-based methods including PAM50 have identified well-established clinical subtypes, age distribution patterns at diagnosis as a proxy for etiologic subtype are not established for molecular and genomic tumor classifications.

Methods

We evaluated smoothed age frequency distributions at diagnosis for Carolina Breast Cancer Study cases within immunohistochemistry-based and RNA-based expression categories. Akaike information criterion (AIC) values compared the fit of single density versus two-component mixture models. Two-component mixture models estimated the proportion of early-

SUBMITTER: Allott EH 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6985047 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature