Dissertation 23 Feb 2018: Johanna Holm

On Friday Feb 23, Johanna Holm will defend her thesis "Aggressive breast cancer: epidemiological studies addressing disease heterogeneity". Her opponent will be Professor Lucile Adams-Campbell from Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center at Georgetown University, U.S.A. Johanna's supervisors are Kamila Czene, Keith Humphreys and Per Hall.

Johanna's thesis seeks to increase our understanding of aggressive breast cancer, and how risk factors may be related to it. The thesis contains four studies and the first focused on comparing interval cancers to cancers detected at screening. The second study looked at predictors intended to identify healthy women’s risk of breast cancer in future prevention efforts to see if they were skewed towards certain tumour characteristics. Study III was a case-control study which estimated odds ratios for each of four breast cancer molecular subtypes separately and found subtype heterogeneity in the odds ratios for genetic risk factors and for breastfeeding. Study IV assessed the concordance between PAM50 gene expression-based and immunohistochemistry-based molecular subtypes.

Time and location: 09:00, Feb 23 2018 in the lecture hall Hillarp, Retzius väg 8, Karolinska Institutet, Solna