International Journal of Contemporary Surgery

Breast carcinoma is one of the most common cancers in the women worldwide. Histological grading of breast carcinoma using the Nottingham modification of Bloom and Richardson is a widely accepted tumor grading system and has been found to have good prognostic correlations. Fine needle aspiration cytology is increasingly being used for the pre-operative diagnosis of breast cancer. Attempts have been made to determine various prognostic parameters on FNA material for the management in a given case.

This study was done evaluate the use of cytological grading on aspirates of breast carcinoma using Robinson's grading system with reference to the Nottingham modification of Bloom Richardson's histopathological grading.

This is a retrospective study conducted in the department of Pathology of Tertiary care hospital in North Karnataka. Fine needle aspiration smears of 50 patients of infiltrating duct carcinoma-not otherwise specified of breast were evaluated and the selected 32 of them were graded using Robinson's cytological grading criteria. The histological specimens including mastectomy and lumpectomy specimens of all these cases were evaluated using Nottingham method of Bloom Richardson's grading system and the degree of agreement between cytological and histological grading was calculated.

The degree of agreement of cytological grading with histological grading was calculated using kappa statistics.

Robinsons cytological grading showed moderate degree of agreement with Bloom Richardson's histological grading with a k value of 0.459 with a statistical significance of P =0.001.

Cytological Grading of breast carcinoma correlates well with histopathological grading and may be used as a useful preoperative prognostic marker in management of breast carcinoma.