Ductal carcinoma In-Situ in turner syndrome patient undergoing hormone replacement therapy: A case report

Abstract

Turner’s syndrome is a rare congenital disease which affects about 1 in every 2500-3000 live-born females. This happens due to chromosomal abnormalities in a phenotypic female, causing increased gonadotropin concentrations and low concentrations of estrogens from infancy. As a result, hormone replacement therapy is started in most adolescent Turner syndrome patients to initiate and sustain sexual maturation. Accordingly, most Turner’s syndrome patients undergo several decades of estrogen replacement therapy, from puberty to post-menopausal age. The highly publicized findings of the Women’s Health Initiative have called into question the appropriateness of hormone replacement therapy in adolescents with Turner’s syndrome. Those concerns were mostly theoretical extrapolations, as few prospective studies of cancer occurrence in women with Turner syndrome have been reported. Consequently, several recent publications have challenged those extrapolations, based on the assertion that the levels of hormone replacement in Turner syndrome patients are well below the physiologic levels observed in normal menstruating women, as well as the fact that these women are significantly younger than those studied by the Women’s Health Initiative. In discord to those reports, we present a case of ductal carcinoma in-situ in a 40-year-old Turner patient, who had undergone over two decades of combined hormone replacement therapy. The patient underwent an elective excisional biopsy for a palpable mass, with histopathology revealing a complex fibroadenoma with a nidus of ductal carcinoma in-situ. The lesion was noted to be estrogen receptor positive and progesterone receptor negative, with heavy staining for HER-2/Neu receptor. The patient was treated with tamoxifen. While a rare case, it is imperative for the astute clinician to keep in mind the consequences of long-term hormone replacement therapy in Turner’s syndrome patients in order to avoid missed diagnosis of breast cancer for optimum management of these patients.