For aim 4) we utilized clinical windows to group individual patient OPN values: (a) baseline (pre-randomization/4 months); (b) recurrent cases (Period 1: 8 months after randomization to 18 months prior to recurrence; Period 2: <18 months from recurrence until collection stopped), (c) non-recurrent cases (baseline/4 months; any other time).
In our study we found that miR-449a had a similar fold change difference of 3.8 compared with 3.2 for miR-449b between the recurrent and non-recurrent cases, but miR-449a expression was not significantly associated with recurrence in Mann–Whitney test.
The results of our studies showed that the positive rates of E-cadherin and β-catenin with postoperative recurrence were both significantly lower when compared to those of postoperative non-recurrent cases.
Two studies reported the use of SLNB for non-recurrent cases followed by complete ipsilateral inguinal lymph node dissection [9, 10].
However, in the 12 non-recurrent cases, the positive rate of E-cadherin was 75%.
The recurrent cases tended to be milder than non-recurrent cases, which could favour chronicity [ 1].
We also examined β1-integrin expression, comparing recurrent versus non-recurrent cases [see Additional file 1].
We found that a high percentage of β1-integrin expression is associated with recurrent cases compared with non-recurrent cases (40% versus 5.3%, OR = 10.8, P = 0.09).
Student t-test showed that mean Topo II- α labelling index (LI) in recurrent cases was significantly higher than that in non-recurrent cases (P = 0.0001).
Among the five recurrent cases, all five (100%) had a percentage score of 3 compared with the non-recurrent cases (63.2%).
Breast seems to be a particular case were the Z data tend to improve the sensitivity (i.e. classifying the recurrent cases), whereas the X* data tend to improve the specificity (i.e. classifying the non-recurrent cases).
