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A prospective study of comparable Japanese and British breast cancer patients treated by radical mastectomy confirmed previously reported findings that sinus histiocytosis and germinal center hyperplasia are more frequently seen in axillary lymph nodes from Japanese than in those from British patients. In Japanese, but not British, cases of either of these two morphologic findings had favorable prognostic significance for recurrence. Sinus histiocytosis also had favorable prognostic significance in Japanese cases for five year survival. In a separate review of axillary nodes from Japanese autopsy cases sinus histiocytosis was absent, suggesting that this finding in Japanese breast cancer cases was related to presence of the disease.

Normal Japanese women had significantly more of their blood 17 beta-estradiol (E2) bound to sex hormone-binding globulin (SHBG) (53%) than British women (30%) and conversely less bound to albumin. While the proportion of SHBG-bound E2 increased with SHBG capacity and while binding fell as weight increased, the differences between the races do not appear to be explicable in terms of SHBG capacity or weight. At a given SHBG capacity, the Japanese women had more E2 bound to the protein than the British women. Where weights in the 2 populations overlapped, the Japanese women still had more of their E2 bound to SHBG than did the British women. Our results suggested that the affinity of albumin for E2 is lower in Japanese women.