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Great attention is traditionally given to the investigation of breast cancer characteristics. In the past, axillary lymph node status was the most important factor for the decision on adjuvant therapy. At present, higher accent is being laid on the characteristics of the primary tumor. Basic treatment strategy is being set just at the time of setting the diagnosis of malignant disease. For this reason it is very important to know the validity, reliability and pitfalls of the examinations of breast cancer prognostic and predictive markers. This study deals with the comparison of breast cancer characteristics set at the time of diagnosis with those verified histologically after surgery. This retrospective trial analyses data from medical records of 411 patients with early primary breast cancer treated with primary surgical procedure. Statistical analysis proved good or very good agreement between preoperative and postoperative results in following cancer characteristics: invasivity, histological type, grading, proliferative activity and percentage of steroid hormone receptors and HER-2/neu receptors. On the contrary, measurements of tumor size and settings of the numbers of tumor foci exhibited poor correlation. Biggest disagreements were described in women with preoperative histological diagnosis "carcinoma in situ": the differences were proven both for the tumor size and the number of tumor foci, and also for setting of invasiveness itself. Preoperative investigation of the axillary lymph node status has to be considered very unreliable -- the false negative rates of this investigation exceeded 92 percent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]