Table 3  Anti-p53 negative patients do not become positive with recurrent disease  Sixty patients who were negative for p53 autoantibodies had also had a plasma sample taken within 30 days of their primary diagnosis of breast cancer. To determine whether antibody status at diagnosis might have been predictive of later disease behaviour (ie independent of the current negative status), we compared two patient subgroups: patients with current nonactive disease and patients with current active disease. With one exception, all patients were antibody negative within 30 days of initial diagnosis. This showed that recurrent disease is highly unlikely to induce a humoral anti-p53 response in those patients who were initially antibody negative.