Effect of CTCs and INHBA level on the effect and prognosis of different treatment methods for patients with early breast cancer
Authors: B Liu
D-Q Chen
X-Q Wang
T Wang
B-Y Li
Journal: European review for medical and pharmacological sciences (2020)
Discipline: PHARMACOLOGY & TOXICOLOGY
Keywords: Circulating tumor cells; INHBA expression; breast cancer; treatment efficacy; prognosis prediction
Affiliations: Department of Oncology Surgery, Qishan County Hospital of Shaanxi Province, Baoji, China. .

Abstract:  Objective: We aimed at investigating the changes in the number of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) in patients with early breast cancer (BCa) before and after different treatments, and the influence of INHBA expression on patients' therapy efficacy and prognosis prediction was also evaluated. Patients and methods: Treatment plans were formulated based on patient's condition and willingness. 160 patients with early BCa were divided into trastuzumab adjuvant group (80 cases) and surgery group (80 cases). The correlation between the number of CTCs and Inhibin, beta A (INHBA) level was assessed by Spearman correlation analysis. The cumulative survival curve was depicted using Kaplan-Meier method to evaluate the prognosis of patients in different groups. Results: The number of detected CTCs and INHBA expression in the two groups were both reduced as compared with those before chemotherapy. After 3 months of treatment, CTCs and INHBA level in the surgical group were detected lower than those in the trastuzumab group. The number of CTCs was positively correlated with INHBA level. The overall survival rate of patients in the surgery group was remarkably higher than those in the adjuvant trastuzumab group. Conclusions: The CTCs in the peripheral blood of patients with early BCa showed a great relevance to INHBA expression, which may thus serve as predictors of treatment effect and prognosis of BCa patients in early stage. Meanwhile, we demonstrate that surgery should be the first choice for early BCa patients after chemotherapy. 

Retracted: No

PubPeer comments:
 From the methods:  *160 early BCa patients treated in the hospital from July 2016 to May 2019 were selected as the research objects.* Table 1 of this paper reports that more than half of the breast cancer patients in this set of 160 patients were male (blue box). Now, men get breast cancer too, but it is rare (about 1% in the US as per https: www.cdc.gov cancer uscs about data-briefs no19-male-breast-cancer-incidence-mortality-UnitedStates-2013-2017.htm ), so this is a highly unexpected ratio in real-life patient sets. ![file] , 
 Figure 1 shows the 5y survival rates for these patients. That is quite remarkable because the date of the first enrollment is only 4 years before the publication of this paper, while the last-enrolled patients only had 1.5 before the paper got published. Something does not add up here. Together with the problems noted in comment #1, this casts serious concerns about the validity of the data reported in this paper. ![file] , 
 5-year post-treatment survival rate of 5% - 15% for Stage-I and stage-II breast cancer would be really, really terrible, if these had been actual patients. ,