Professional article on LCIS

nash---they were supposed to check for ER and PR after my lumpectomy (wide excisional biopsy) by immunohistochemical tests; the surgeon said they ended up not doing so because the tissue sample was too small.  (I ended up taking tamoxifen anyway as there was nothing else for LCIS at the time).  My pathology report says nothing about any e-cadherin or pleomorphism. It makes me wonder then, how did they differentiate it from low grade DCIS? (If they look so similar) It's been over 4 years, I think it would be very difficult to  get that information now, unless the pathologist still has the reports of what techniques he used (or didn't use).

Well, it sounds like in this article that you can stain for e-cadherin on paraffin embeded samples (in this study of inflammatory breast cancer.) "Clinical and pathologic features were studied, and formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded tissue sections were immunostained for E-cadherin, estrogen and progesterone receptors (ER and PR, respectively), and HER2/neu. "

http://www.nature.com/modpathol/journal/v14/n5/full/3880334a.html



According to this Dec 2006 paper, it is usually easy to tell between DCIS and LCIS, but in some cases its more difficult, so they were advocating immunostaining. "Most breast carcinomas in situ are easily categorized as ductal (DCIS) or lobular (LCIS) (Figure 1). However, some CIS lesions have indeterminate histological features (Figure 2)[1, 2]. A pleomorphic variant of invasive lobular carcinoma (PILC) is known to be an aggressive variant of invasive lobular carcinoma (ILC)[3]. Its in situ counterpart, (PLCIS), defined by Frost et al.[4] in 1996, has not been fully defined histologically and biologically (Figure 3). PLCIS, like PILC, is expected to be more aggressive than LCIS (Figure 4)[5]. Moreover, although classic LCIS is considered a risk marker for cancer when compared to DCIS, the clinical and biological significance of PLCIS is currently unknown[4]." http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1828915





My original pathology report says I have LCIS with pagetoid spread into the ducts. I have read a post by a woman who has DCIS with pagetoid spread into the lobules, so it sounds like in some instances/ ?most? they can tell whether cells originate from ducts or lobules..