| In recent years, the relationship between HPV infection and a variety of different malignancies has become one of the hot-point in the field of biomedical research. Several studies have been carried out on the putative roles of HPV infection in the pathogenesis of esophageal squamous carcinoma. It has been found that HPV DNA could be detected in esophageal cancer tissues. The positive detection rates of HPV in the cancer tissues from different areas and with different methods varied dramatically, ranging from 0 to 67%. Thus, it is still quite difficult to ascertain the etiological roles of HPV for esophageal carcinoma. As we all know that the incidence of esophageal cancer changes greatly in different areas. Among the highest incidence (risk) areas around the world are some areas in Hebei, Henan, Fujian and Guangdong provinces in China.Cixian county in Hebei Province is one of the high incidence areas of esophageal carcinoma in our country and has been the prevention and treatment research base of esophageal cancer since 1960s. For several decades, many works on the etiological, carcinogenesis and strategies ofprevention and treatment, especially, on the etiological and carcinogenesis of esophageal carcinoma have been conducted. The emphasis of the previous etiological and carcinogenesis works were mainly on dietary contamination of fungi and mycotoxins, nitrosamine and nutritional unbalance, etc. No work has been done on the prevalence of HPV in the esophageal cancer tissues of the high incidence area in Cixian County.FHIT (Fragile Histidine Triad) gene, located in 3p 14.2, is a putative tumor suppressor gene. The loss of heterozygosity and abnormal transcripts of FHIT gene, decrease or loss of FHIT expression in protein levels were found in many malignant tumors, such as lung cancer, cervical cancer, and carcinomas in head and neck. The loss of FHIT gene has close relationship with environmental carcinogens. The loss of heterozygosity and abnormal transcripts of FHIT gene have been more found in carcinomas with known exposure to environmental carcinogens. Some environmental factors, such as smoking and alcohol abuse were found to have close relationship with the abnormal expression of FHIT gene. Human papilloma virus, which is a possible etiological factor in cervical cancer, has been found to be able to integrate its gene into the chromosome 3 fragile site of cultured cell, deleting a piece of DNA which includes the FHIT gene, resulting in the loss and the abnormal function of the gene.In order to explore the prevalence of HPV and expression of FHIT in carcinoma tissues of the local residents in the high incidence area of Cixian County and to evaluate their possible roles and interaction in the carcinogenesis, we conducted the following experiments.Method: The existence and prevalence of HPV and the expression of FHIT gene at protein level in esophageal cancer tissues were respectively studied with PCR ( polymerase chain reaction) using LI area general primers G05/G06 and immunohistochemical method in 128 archival paraffin-embedded blocks of esophageal squamous carcinoma from high risk area collected during 2000-2001 and 24 from low incidence area, serving as control.Result: The PCR result showed that the positive detection rate of HPV in esophageal carcinoma tissues was 20.3% (26/128) for the cases of high incidence area and 8.3% (2/24) for the cases from low incidence area. There is no significant difference between them.The finding of immunohistochemical analysis of FHIT gene revealed that loss and decrease of FHIT expression was noted in 75.6% cases from high incidence area in Cixian County and while that for the cases from low incidence area was only 54.1%, which was significantly lower than that of the former(P<0.05). The loss of FHIT expression in the cases from high incidence area is much higher than that of the control (49/82, 58.9% vs 8/24, 33.3%, p<0.025). The Lossand decrease of FHIT expression was related wi... |
PDF Full Text Request