Endocrine Abstracts

Introduction: Breast cancer is one of the diseases causing the most deaths in women worldwide. Obesity, especially in postmenopausal women is a definite risk factor due to hormonal imbalance mainly to the levels of circulating oestrogen. The aim was to record levels for some gonadal axis hormones in breast cancer treated obese women.

Patients and methods: 81 women aged between 21 and 80 years 54 are diagnosed with breast cancer (BC) during postmenopausal (PoBC) and premenopausal (PrBC) under different treatments, and 27 pre and postmenopausal women constitute the control groups (PrC and PoC). BMI lipidaemia, inflammatory status established by agglutinated plasma C-reactive protein (CRP) test, plasma LH, FSH, oestradiol, DHEA-S, androstenedione, prolactin, and testosterone were estimated by RIA.

Results: Obesity is predominant in PoBC group with 50 vs 35% in PrBC. while overweigh-obese women group represents 72% of PrBC and 83% PoBC groups respectively. Obesity in PoBC patients was mainly associated to dyslipidaemia, including significant increase in plasma total cholesterol, LDL-c, TG and HDL-c decrease. FSH increase in PrBC (126.3%; P=0.01) and decrease in PoBC (3.8%) was concomitant to DHEA-S fall in PrBC (42.8%; P=0.037) and increase in PoBC (51.3%; P=0.031) vs control groups. Whereas LH and estradiol increased concomitantly in PrBC (14.9 and 13.8%), but decreased (40.5 and 3.8%) in PoBC, testosterone was significantly reduced in regrouped PrBC and PoBC patients (24.2%; P=0.04). while androstenedione and prolactin fall of 17.5 and 11.9% respectively in regrouped PrBC and POBC patients.

Discussion conclusion: Obesity is confirmed as breast cancer risk factor in postmenopausal women. The sensitivity to hormone therapy appear to be more efficient in PoBC women with BMI≤30 compared to PrBC patients, and reveal their efficiency to decrease plasma oestradiol, leading to activate positive feedback mechanism on LH and FSH secretion.

Disclosure: This work was supported by financial help from Algerian National Research Program (PNR).