Breast cancer is a common malignancy and the modalities and the aggressiveness of treatment strategies are variable and depend on information regarding the biological characteristics and behavior of an individual tumor. Therefore, to improve overall survival it is important to identify and select lymph node negative patients at high risk who would benefit from adjuvant therapy. Besides prognostic factors such as lymph node status, hormone receptor status and histopathologic parameters, nm23 antimetastatic gene and the p53 protein were studied in 32 breast cancer patients. Positive staining for nm23 was inversely associated with lymph node involvement in 82.4% of the cases. Most of the non-diploid lesions (70.8%) showed a high protein expression. Positive immunostaining for p53 was present in 28.1% of the cases and was strongly correlated with prognostic indicators such as necrosis and histologic grading. Tumor grade, DNA ploidy and lymph node metastasis were not significantly correlated with p53 protein expression. In this study, all the prognostic indicators studied, satisfactorily explain the important characteristics of the biologic behaviour of breast cancer, but the detection of lymph node metastasis is still the most accurate prognostic factor utilized for a predictive role in disease recurrence.

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