ER positive became ER negative

ALovingDaughter

is it possible to become ER negative when you were initially ER positive? That happened to my mom though i don't really trust the recent breast panel since the immunohistochemistry test was done by different pathologists

MelissaDallas

Are you talking about between initial biopsy and final surgical pathology? Does she have a recurrence or new cancer? Yes, it is possible to change, but all your posts have had very minimal information. Can you give more complete information about history/timeline and what is happening? What prompts your question

moth

I did. My initial biopsy ER was read as positive at about 10% (PR - & HER2 -). Then I had oncotype testing which listed me as TNBC. Two different pathologist re-read my samples and determined the staining was essentially nil and I was negative. We went over this for many months with people looking at my samples and trying to decide if it was an initial lab error or if I had a hetergeneic tumor but I don't really think we ever arrived at an answer.

It's literally a stain which is applied to the cell and the pathologist has to determine how strong the stain is & how many cells in the field take up the stain. Different people can view it differently. In case of discordance like this, I'd ask for a re-read by a third pathologist but she's either triple neg or very weakly ER+ which in a way leads you to the same place - hit it hard with chemo. The only decision is whether hormone therapy is appropriate or not and there is not a lot of data on which to make this decision.