Breast cancer in a patient with Birt-Hogg-Dubé syndrome (BHDS) with dramatic response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy.

This is a case of 49-year-old white woman who presented with a rapidly growing right sided breast mass. A subsequent punch biopsy confirmed grade 3 invasive mammary carcinoma of no special type which was negative for oestrogen receptor, progesterone receptor and Her-2 neu overexpression. She was a carrier of folliculin gene mutation that is characteristic of Birt-Hogg-Dubé syndrome (BHDS), a condition known to cause skin lesions, renal cancers and pneumothoraces. Family history revealed patient's mother, grandmother and maternal aunt developed renal cell carcinomas during their lifetime and were positive for the same germ line mutation. Tumour tissue was positive for TP53 mutation and negative for BRCA1, BRCA2 and other genes commonly associated with breast cancer. We report a patient with BHDS presenting with breast cancer that showed dramatic response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy prior to bilateral mastectomy, local chest wall radiation and 6 months of adjuvant capecitabine.

mRNA expression data in breast cancers before and after consumption of walnut by women.

This article contains supporting data for the research paper entitled: 'Dietary walnut altered gene expressions related to tumor growth, survival, and metastasis in breast cancer patients: a pilot clinical trial' [1] Hardman et al., 2019. Included are tables for all mapped genes and all unmapped loci identifications that were significantly changed in breast cancers by consumption of walnut for about 2 weeks. All gene networks that were identified by Ingenuity Pathway Analyses as modified are shown in table 3. Files containing the raw reads, along with a shell script describing the complete data analysis pipeline, were deposited to the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) and can be obtained via accession number GSE111073. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo/query/acc.cgi?acc=GSE111073.

Dietary walnut altered gene expressions related to tumor growth, survival, and metastasis in breast cancer patients: a pilot clinical trial.

Consumption of walnuts has slowed breast cancer growth and/or reduced the risk of mammary cancer in mice. The benefit against cancer was associated with altered expression of genes for cancer growth and survival. We hypothesized that walnut consumption would alter gene expression in pathologically confirmed breast cancers of women in a direction that would be expected to decrease breast cancer growth and survival, as was seen in mice. The study was a nonplacebo, 2-arm, clinical trial. Women with breast lumps large enough for research and pathology biopsies were recruited and randomized to walnut consuming or control groups. Immediately after biopsy collection, women in the walnut group began to consume 2 oz of walnuts per day until follow-up surgery. Pathological studies confirmed that lumps were breast cancer in all women who remained in the trial. At surgery, about 2 weeks after biopsy, additional specimens were taken from the breast cancers. Changes in gene expression in the surgical specimen compared to baseline were determined in each individual woman in walnut-consuming (n = 5) and control (n = 5) groups. RNA sequencing expression profiling revealed that expression of 456 identified genes was significantly changed in the tumor due to walnut consumption. Ingenuity Pathway Analysis showed activation of pathways that promote apoptosis and cell adhesion, and inhibition of pathways that promote cell proliferation and migration. These results support the hypothesis that, in humans, walnut consumption could suppress growth and survival of breast cancers.