Spontaneous apoptosis in the intra-ductal component's stroma of breast invasive carcinoma.

Spontaneous apoptosis by in situ detection of DNA fragmentation (DNAf) was investigated in breast invasive ductal carcinoma (IDC) frozen samples removed from 61 untreated patients. The incidence of DNAf was low in carcinoma cells and was mainly detected in the stroma. In the stroma at a distance from carcinoma cells, DNAf was inversely related to estradiol plasma level variations (p=0.