Circulating breast tumour antigen-sensitive T lymphocytes in early breast cancer and high risk benign breast disease.

Levels of circulating T lymphocytes sensitized to breast tumour associated antigens (BTA) were correlated with pathological tumour stage or benign histopathology in preoperative studies of 180 patients by the antigen-stimulated active rosette-forming T cell (AgARFC) assay. Incubation of lymphocytes with allogeneic BTA extracts produced increased AgARFC compared with incubation without BTA. Significant levels of BTA-sensitive T cells were found in 78 per cent of breast cancer patients compared with 23 per cent of patients with benign disease (P less than 0.0005, by X2). Over 93 per cent of stage I cancer patients responded to BTA, compared with 69 per cent of stage II patients (P less than 0.025) and 59 per cent of stages III-IV patients (P less than 0.005). Twenty-nine per cent of 42 patients with fibrocystic disease were positive to BTA in contrast to 8 per cent of 25 patients with fibroadenomas. This was a 3.6-fold higher incidence of BTA-sensitive T cells associated with fibrocystic disease than with fibroadenomas, which was in agreement with the increased breast cancer risk rate associated with fibrocystic disease. These findings suggest that the AgARFC assay may detect early malignant change in fibrocystic disease. The AgARFC assay was found to reliably detect early invasive carcinoma.