As a kind of breast cancer surgery choice,the nipple-sparing mastectomy (NSM)saves the patients′nipple-areola complex (NAC)which has significant meaning for patients′cosmetic results and posto-peration reconstruction.However,the clinical application of NSMis still in controversial.Some hot topics about oncological safety of NSM have appeared in recent years,such as the screening criterion of the enrolled patients,the situation of NAC involvement and the complications after NSM and handing methods.

With the extensive use of sentinel lymph node biopsy (SLNB), some breast cancer patients could avoid axillary lymph node dissection (ALND) and its complications. Neoadjuvant chemotherapy plays an important role in the multimodality therapies of breast cancer. After neoadjuvant chemotherapy, some patients with breast cancer were down-staged from positive axillary lymph node (cN+ ) to clinically negative (cN0). For these patients, the feasibility and safety of sentinel lymph node biopsy remains controversial. However, with the application of new technologies, SLNB is expected to become the main treatment for breast cancer patients with stage cN0 after neoadjuvant chemotherapy.

Objective To screen out significant differential genes for predicting the effect of neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) and select the most suitable breast cancer patients for NAC. Methods A total of 60 breast cancer patients' samples before and after NAC were collected for high-throughput RNA-Seq. We selected AHNAK, CIDEA, ADIPOQ and AKAP12 as the candidate genes that related to tumor chemotherapeutic resistance. We analyzed the correlation of AHNAK, CIDEA, ADIPOQ, AKAP12 expression levels with the effect of NAC by logistic regression analysis, constructed a prediction model and demonstrated the model by the nomogram. Results AHNAK, CIDEA, ADIPOQ and AKAP12 expression were up-regulated in the residual tumor tissues of non-pCR group after NAC(P < 0.05). Compared with pCR group, non-pCR group presented higher expression levels of AHNAK, CIDEA, ADIPOQ and AKAP12 (P < 0.05). The high expression levels of AHNAK, CIDEA, ADIPOQ and AKAP12 significantly reduced the pCR rate of NAC for breast cancer (P < 0.05). Our prediction model which AHNAK, CIDEA, ADIPOQ and AKAP12 were involved in showed a good fitting effect with H1 test (χ²=6.3967, P=0.4945) and the ROC curve (AUC 0.8249, 95%CI: 0.722-0.9271). Conclusion AHNAK, CIDEA, ADIPOQ and AKAP12 may be novel marker genes for NAC effect on breast cancer. The efficacy prediction model based on this result is expected to be a new method to select the optimal patients of breast cancer for neoadjuvant chemotherapy.