Sometimes in your life, you might have heard the term “hormone receptor status” as the most common form of breast cancer is ER+ cancer (estrogen receptor–positive) and responsible for up to 80% of all breast cancer incidence.

But what does that mean? Let me tell you the exact reason why these overexpressed estrogen hormone receptors stimulate the cancer prognosis and how to treat this disease.

If your test results show you’ve estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer, it implies that your cancerous breast cells are growing due to high estrogen levels.

Breast cancer is a tricky one – it can exhibit in all shapes, sizes, and genetic makeup or ‘genotype’ – which is responsible for up to 15% of people developing breast cancer diseases, due to they have inherited germline mutations.

But one of the most common ways pathologists classify breast cancer through IHC tests on the basis of uniform hormone receptor expressions: estrogen (ER), progesterone (PR), and serum HER-2 levels (approximately 18% increased level cause primary breast cancer and if reached to 46% cause metastatic breast cancers).

These proteins (estrogen or progesterone receptors) are called hormone receptors, and during biopsy of breast cancer cells are tested to diagnose if they have certain proteins or are absent.

The presence of these receptors (proteins) on your breast cancer cells implies that the hormones estrogen and progesterone have latch onto the cells and stimulate cancer growth by attaching to proteins.

On the other side, “hormone receptor-negative” means if cancers don’t have progesterone receptors/PR (around 15% of breast cancers don’t have ER/PR), hormones can’t send the same growth signals.

Hormone estrogen and progesterone receptors:

Your breast cancer cells will be examined in a pathology test to check if they have estrogen (ER) receptors, progesterone (PR) receptors, or both.

Hormone receptors are proteins in breast cells that are responsible for tumorigenic breast cancer — mainly found in ducts and lobules and receive signals from estrogen that cause cancer cells to abnormal grow.

Now, you might be wondering – why do we need to know hormone receptor status?

Well, knowing the hormone receptor status is crucial for figuring out the best treatment approach. If your breast cancer cell does have either estrogen or progesterone or both of these hormone receptors, special hormone therapy drugs are used to either block estrogen/progesterone connecting to the cancer cells or lower their levels in the body.

These anti-estrogen drugs tend to work better on hormone receptor-positive breast cancer cases, as they essentially impede estrogen’s ability to breast cancer cells’ growth.

So when your doctor tells you to do some lab tests on your breast cancer biopsy, they’re essentially trying to build a profile of your unique tumour status.

Are the cells hormone receptor-positive? HER2-positive? Or do they recur? This information is gold for planning your personalised treatment strategy.

You know, the physicians tell us that almost 3 out of 4 breast cancers have at least one of those hormone receptors – estrogen or progesterone. Sounds scary, but it’s necessary to know about it.

As we see already, those hormone receptors are made of proteins in the cancer cells that can latch onto hormones like estrogen and progesterone. If the cancer cells have these receptors (proteins), the hormones can make the cancer grow and spread. But if your treatment can block the hormones from binding, it may be able to slow down or even stop the cancer.

That’s where the hormone receptor tests come in. The pathologists will usually do an immunohistochemistry (IHC) test on a sample of the cancer tissue to see if it’s ER-positive (has estrogen receptors), PR-positive (has progesterone receptors), or maybe even both. Knowing this helps them decide the best way to treat your breast cancer.

Now, hope you get this – if your cancer comes back after treatment, it’s a good idea to ask for another biopsy. The receptors might have changed, which could mean the treatments that worked before might not be as effective anymore. Scary, right? But knowing that can help your pathologist find the right plan of treatment.

What this means for patients!

Knowing how breast tumours occur and how timely therapy and diagnosis can fight and timely check from a breast cancer screening machine will eventually lead to precise personalisation of patients’ breast cancer care.

Koning vera breast cancer screening UK is based on full field digital mammography system, FDA-approved full field digital mammography ‘Koning breast CT scan‘ gives early detection of cancer lesions in less than 2mm in size.

Its true isotropic 3D images DBT technology can produce low-dose radiation, and generate CT image reconstructions of the breast in less than 7 seconds per breast. This all-in-one device is capable of 3D-guided screening and biopsy tests of your breasts.