Expression Of Galectin-3 In Cholangiocarcinoma And Its Significance

The cholangiocarcinoma is a malignant tumor derived from the epithelium of the bile duct. As a result of its special anatomical position and characteristic of tending to infiltrate surrounding tissues, vessels and nerves, the radical resection is usually difficult and its prognosis is bad. Because of the lack of means of early cholangiocarcinoma diagnosis and deep understanding of its pathogenesis, its incidence rate and fatality rate is rising year by year. So it is very significant for improving the diagnosis and treatment of cholangiocarcinoma to study deeply its pathogenesis and molecular biological features of metastasis and explore new effective therapeutic methods. It has been verified that the expression of Galectin-3 in many kinds of tumor tissue is many times higher than that in relevent normal tissue. Athough Galectin-3 is closely connected with the occurrence and progression of many tumors, its relation with cholangiocarcinoma has rarely been studied. So, it has very important clinical significance to find new tumor-marker and treatment-marker and mechanism of onset.Our experiment analyze the expression of Galectin-3 protein in every specimen of the cholangiocarcinoma tissues and normal bile duct tissues by immunohistochemistry method, so as to investigate its clinical significance.MethodsThe pathological samples are from 63 cholangiocarcinoma surgical tissues and 25 cases of normal bile duct tissues of the first and the third affiliated hospital of Shanxi Medical University from Jan of 2000 to Jun of 2009. We detected the expression of Galectin-3 protein in the cholangiocarcinoma tissues and normal tissues by immunologic histochemistry methods. Statistic analysis was completed with statistic softwareSPSS11.5,and its expression with the clinical and pathologic characters of cholangiocarcinoma was analyzed.ResultsGalectin-3 positive staining was mainly located in cytoplasm or cell membrane with brown-yellowish color.(1)Galectin-3 was expressed in 61 of 63(96.83%) cases of cholangiocarcinoma, in 2 of 25(4.00%) cases of normal bile duct tissues. The percentage of the Galectin-3-positive tissue was significantly higher in the cholangiocarcinoma than in the normal bile duct, and the difference has statistical significance (P<0.01). (2) The expression of Galectin-3 protein in cholangiocarcinoma is significantly related with tumor invasion and metastasis and clinical stage of tumor according to TNM and not related with patient's age,sex.Conclusion(1)The expression level of Galectin-3 protein was significantly higher in cholangiocarcinoma than in normal bile duct, which shows that Galectin-3 is related to the occurrence and progression of cholangiocarcinoma. (2) These results showed that the expression of Galectin-3 was significantly related with cholangiocarcinoma invasion and metastasis, which shows that Galectin-3 may participate in cholangiocarcinoma metastasis.