Summary

Recently described, invasive micropapillary carcinoma of the breast has a poor prognosis and is defined as a variant of invasive ductal carcinoma. In this study, 166 cases with a diagnosis of invasive ductal carcinoma and 10 cases with a diagnosis of invasive micropapillary carcinoma (pure and mixed) were compared in view of their clinicopathologic features at Izmir Ataturk Education and Research Hospital during a period lasting from January 2001- July 2003. In our study, invasive micropapillary carcinoma cases were younger than invasive ductal carcinoma cases and the tumors of the invasive micropapillary carcinoma cases were larger. In invasive micropapillary carcinoma, there was no case whose histological and nuclear degree was I. The presence of ductal carcinoma insitu component, vascular invasion and lymph node metastases rate were higher in cases with invasive micropapillary carcinoma. All these findings support that invasive micropapillary carcinoma has worse prognostic features compared to invasive ductal carcinoma. p53, ER, PR, cerb-B2 results were not significant in statistical analysis in comparison of two groups of tumors. In conclusion, we suggest that, if invasive micropapillary carcinoma is present even focally in a breast carcinoma, it should be clearly emphasized in pathology reports.