The Clinicopathological Significance Of DEK Protein Expression In Uterine Cervical Lesions

Objectives: To investigate the significance of DEK protein expression in uterine cervical lesions and its relationship with HPV infection status, DEK protein expression was studied in total 253 cases of cervical lesions.Materials and Methods: 30 non-neoplastic cervix with or without squamous metaplasia, 64 cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (28 CIN-1, 17 CIN-2, and 19 CIN-3), 102 squamous cell carcinomas (SCCs), 51 adenocarcinomas, and 6 adenosquamous cell carcinomas by immunohistochemistry. For comparison, HPV positive and negative cervical cancer cell lines were also included. And the HPV screening was performed by using TaKaRa PCR method.Results: the immunohistochemical staining showed that DEK was negative in all 30 cases of non-neoplastic cervical epithelia, however, positive in 96.1% of SCCs (98/102), 92.2% of adenocarcinomas (47/51), 100% of AdenoSCCs (6/6), 85.7% of CIN-1 (24/28), 94.1% of CIN-2 (16/17), and 89.5% of CIN-3 (17/19). There is no significant difference between HPV positive and negative cervical lesions. Also, the strongly positive staining was observed in all above cervical cancer cell lines regardless the HPV infection by immunocytochemistry.Conclusions: DEK plays an important role in the carcinogenesis of cervical cancers, and can be helpful for the early diagnosis, and a potential therapeutic target.