Study On Exprssions Of WAF1 And C-erbB-2 Oncogene Protein In Patient With Cardiac Carcinoma And Their Correlations With Clinical Significance

Cardiac carcinoma is a commonly seen malignant cancer in our country with a high mortality. So far, the major management for it is treated surgically. However, the therapeutic effect is far from as satisfied as expected. The main causes of death following operation were the recurrence and metastasis of the disease. So in addition to making use of the clinical data as the evidences of choice for treatment, how to find out the prognostic predictors, precisely assess the prognosis and identify the patients with more malignant potential and then perform combined therapy for those patients in time are becoming very crucial. The genes of WAF1 and C-erbB-2 discovered recently, whose expressions status were reported to be clinically valuable in various rumors, were closely associated with cell proliferation.THE OBJECTIVES:l.to investigate the expressions of WAF1 and C-erbB-2 oncogene protein in cardiac carcinoma;2. to evaluate the relationship between the expressions of WAF1 and C-erbB-2 oncogene protein and the clinicopathological factors in cardiac carcinoma;3. to assess the prognostic significance of the expressions of WAF1 and C-erbB-2 oncogene protein in cardiac carcinoma.MATERAL and METHODS:In the current study, one hundred and four cases of cardiac carcinoma wereselected from patients who had undergone operation in the Department of Thoracic Surgery, Affiliated Tumor Hospital Medical School of Shantou University in the period of from 1994 to 1995. The diagnosis of all the selected cases had been confirmed through pathological examination and their blocks were embeded in paraffin and preserved well in the Department of Pathology, Medical School of Shantou University. The expressions of WAF1 and C-erbB-2 oncogene protein in 104 cardiac carcinoma samples were detected by immunohistochemical Two-step method and a retrospective analysis was performed combined with data of clinicopathology. RESULTS:The majority of WAF1 protein staining was noted in cellular nucleus and some on the top of nucleus with a positive rate of 26.0%(27/104). In contrast, a great number of C-erbB-2 oncogene protein staining was found to be located in cytoplasm and cytomembrane with a positive rate of 55.8%(37/104), including a weak positive rate of 20.2%(21/104), and a strong positve rate of 35.6%(37/104). The positive expression of WAF1 oncogene protein was significantly correlation with the maximal gross dimension, the degree of differentiation, lymph node metastasis, external invasion and PTNM staging in cardiac carcinoma. The expression of WAF1 oncogene protein in the group with the maximal gross dimension <5cm was higher than that of the group with the maximal gross dimension^5cm (55.6% vs 19.8% P=0.004 ). The expression rate of WAF1 oncogene protein in the group of well and moderate-differentiated tumors were higher than that of the poor-differentiated ones (40.6% vs 19.1% P=0.037 ). In the group with lymph node metastasis, the expression of WAF1 protein was lower than that of those without lymph node involvement (20.3% vs 40.6% P=0.037). The expression rate of WAF 1 oncogene protein in the group of without invasion to adjacent organ was higher than that of those with adjoining involvement (35.5% vs 11.9% P=0.007 ). Furthermore, the current results demonstrated the expression of WAF 1 oncogene protein was closely related to PTNM staging. The expression rate of WAF 1 oncogene protein in the group of I-IL UK IV staging were 43.5%, 30.2% and 3.6% respectively, whose difference was greatly significant according tostatistical analysis(P=0.003). Overexpression of C-erbB-2 protein was significantly correlated with differentiation of tumor, lymph node metastasis and PTNM staging. The strong positive rate of C-erbB-2 protein in the group of lymph node metastasis was higher than that of those with no lymph node metastasis (43.2% vs 16.7% P=0.01)). The strong expression rates of C-erbB-2 oncogene protein in the well-differentiated tumors, moderate-differentiated tumors and poor-differentiated tumors were 62.5%(10/16)...