Background: The relationship between breast cancer and circadian rhythm variation has been extensively studied. Increased breast tumorigenesis has been reported in melatonin-suppressed experimental models and in observational studies.
Objectives: Circulating Tumor Cells (CTC) circadian- rhythm may optimize the timing of therapies. This is a prospective experimental study to ascertain the day-time and night-time CTC levels in hospitalized metastasic breast cancer (MBC) patients.
Material and methods: CTC are isolated and enumerated from a 08:00 AM and 08:00 PM blood collections. 23 MBC and 23 healthy volunteers entered the study. 69 samples were collected (23 samples at 08:00 AM and 23 samples at 08:00 PM from MBC; 23 samples from healthy volunteers). Results from two patients were rejected due to sample processing errors. No CTC were isolated from healthy-volunteers.
Results and discussion: No-differences between daytime and night-time CTC were observed. Therefore, we could not ascertain CTC circadian-rhythm in hospitalized metastasic breast cancer patients.