Hypothesizing that a functional polymorphism, which is involved in cancer susceptibility, is also likely to influence the outcome of a given cancer, we took advantage of a historic breast cancer cohort of clinically documented primary breast cancer patients and investigated prognostic significance of CASP8 -652 6N Ins/Del and CASP8 Asp302His in terms of an exploratory analysis. This evidence concerns the gene CASP8 and breast carcinoma.