Resumen
Patients with metastatic triple-negative breast cancer (mTNBC) have a very poor prognosis. We assume that some mTNBC patients have worse treatment outcomes and defined them as cases of refractory TNBC. We tried to investigate the characteristics and treatment outcomes of our refractory mTNBC cohort selected using a clinical data warehouse (CDW) approach. Between January 1997 and December 2019, TNBC patients were searched for in the breast cancer registry and, among them, pathologically confirmed mTNBC patients were selected as the study cohort (n = 451). Refractory TNBC was defined as cases of TNBC with confirmed distant metastasis within one year after adjuvant treatment. The refractory mTNBC group was younger and had a higher proportion of Ki-67 = 3+ than the nonrefractory group. In addition, a much poorer prognosis existed among mTNBC patients, with an overall survival (OS) of 14.3 months and progression-free survival (PFS) of 4.2 months after first-line palliative chemotherapy compared to an OS of 24.8 months and PFS of 6.2 months in the nonrefractory TNBC group (p < 0.001).