Abstract

Breast cancer (BC) is the most prevalent and life-threatening malignant tumor in adult females. Little is known about the association between neuropeptide leptin hormone and development of BC. The aim of the paper was to evaluate the interactive role of neuropeptide leptin hormone among BC Jordanian women with regard to treatment exposure and menopausal status. A total of 396 BC women (25-65 years) attending BC clinics were evaluated by observational study. The experimental design permitted the inclusion of 134 newly diagnosed BC patients who were not exposed to any type of interventions and 262 recently diagnosed BC patients during their first three months of treatment exposure. Manual enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) was used for the quantitative determination of leptin levels. The prevalence of hyperleptinaemia, leptin level higher than 11.1 ng/ml, was almost 27%, and the mean value of serum leptin (ng/ml) in the whole sample was 8.5 ± 0.03 and it was insignificantly lower in non-chemo (7.1 ± 0.05) than chemo (8.6 ± 0.5) and newly diagnosed (9.2 ± 0.6) BC patients. Leptin was positively correlated with all obesity indices including BMI, WC, WHpR and WHtR. In newly diagnosed BC patients, leptin had the highest correlation with BMI (r = 0.38, p ˂ 0.05), whereas in the recently diagnosed, it was highly correlated with WC ( r = 0.38, p < 0.05). The leptin hormone was positively correlated with obesity indices in BC patients and it was higher in postmenopausal BC women. The leptin hormone was decreased after treatment exposure and may be considered as a biomarker for BC prognosis and response to treatment. The leptin hormone may need a closer attention by health care providers in order to improve outcomes after making the diagnosis and treatment exposure.