Preoperative total cholesterol and axillary lymph node burden in breast cancer: an exploratory analysis with a preliminary nomogram

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This study included 100 patients with primary breast cancer who underwent modified radical mastectomy to assess preoperative serum total cholesterol levels.
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High axillary lymph node burden was defined as more than four metastatic lymph nodes, occurring in 25% of the study population.
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Higher preoperative total cholesterol levels were associated with increased odds of high axillary lymph node burden, with an odds ratio of 1.56 per 1 mmol/L increase.
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The proposed risk estimation model demonstrated limited discriminative performance, with an optimism-corrected C-index of 0.61.
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Further validation in larger studies is required due to the limited sample size and poor model performance observed in this exploratory study.

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