Expression And Clinical Significance Of Osteopontin In Bladder Transitional Cell Carcinoma

Background: Osteopontin (OPN) is a prominent component of extracelluar matrix of mineralized tissue in bone and tooth, which is first extracted as a phosphorylated and glycosylated protein by Senger in 1979.OPN is generally distributed over various tissues such as T leukomonocyte, endothelial cell, osseous cell and tumor cell with diverse functions including osseous tissue mineralization, arteriosclerosis, anti-infection, immunoregulation, ischemical reperfusion injury. Recently, more and more attention was paid in the role of OPN in tumorigenesis and tumor cell metastasis. Many studies indicated that some types tumor cells can secrete OPN. Serum level of OPN is highly detected in some cancer patients especially in the metastased cases. We just have rare information about OPN expression in bladder transitional cell carcinoma at present. In this study, the expression of OPN protein was immunohistochemically analyzed in 45 BTCCs and 12 normal bladder tissues. The relationships between OPN expression and pathological grade, clinical stage, tumor recurrence or cancer-specific survival were studied.Methods and Results:1. Collecting the specimens by hematoxylin and eosin staining. (1) Make sure there is no inflammation canceration in normal bladder tissues. (2) Evaluated the pathological grade and clinical stage of BTCC according to WHO and UICC-TNM standard.2. The expression of OPN protein was immunohistochemically analyzed in 45 BTCCs and 12 normal bladder tissues. The percentages of negative staining in normal bladder tissues and BTCCs were 96.7% and 6.7%, respectively. On the contrary, the percentages of positive staining in normal bladder tissues and BTCCs were 3.3% and 93.3%. In bladder cancer tissues, 46.7% showed strong positive staining, 31.1% and 15.5% showed moderate and faint positive staining, respectively.3. Statistics analysis: numerical data is analyzed by SPSS 11.0. Statistics analysis showed that there are significant correlations between the OPN expression and pathological grade (P<0.01), clinical stage (P<0.01), recurrence (P<0.01), metastasis (P<0.01) or cancer-specific survival (P<0.05).Conclusion: The significant correlations between OPN expression and pathological grade, clinical stage, recurrence, metastatic or survival rate suggest that OPN can be used as a marker for assessing the BTCC progression and prognostic.