Breast cancer subtypes

Broadly speaking the study encompasses
two cohorts of women:
1) 22,000 Norwegian women who participated in a screening program for breast cancer in the early 1960s. As part of the screening, comprehensive information was collected on reproductive factors, including age at menarche, age at first birth, parity, age at last birth, and menopausal status. Now most of these women have died, and more than 1500 developed breast cancer during their life time.

2) Women who participated in the HUNT-2 study in 1995. Similar epidemiological data is registered for these women and about 600 cases of breast cancer have occurred in this cohort to date.

Based on the above mentioned data a number of studies will be carried out in the fields of cancer epidemiology, oncology and pathology.

The main areas of interest in this project are:
A) A comparison of the prognostic and predictive precision of the three histopathological classification systems: histological typing; histopathological grading and subtyping based on genetic subclassification.

B) Studies of the association between factors that have shown consistent associations with breast cancer risk and disease subtype.

C) Molecular pathological studies of the relationship between factors influencing tumour initiation, proliferation, invasiveness and metastasis using high through-put tissue microarrays and molecular pathological methods such as immunohistochemistry, in situ hybridisation, polymerase chain reaction, DNA-sequencing.

D) A comparison between the two cohorts of women with regard to breast cancer epidemiology and molecular characteristics of the tumours occurring in these two populations.