Clinicopathological Significance Of Shh, Ptch And Smo Protein Overexpression In Breast Cancers

Objective:To investigate the clinicopathological significance of shh, ptch and smo protein overexpression in breast invasive ductal carcinoma and ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS).Methods:The expression of shh, ptch and smo proteins was detected by EnVision method of immunohistochemistry in tissue-microarray making from 111 cases of breast invasive ductal carcinoma,40 cases of DCIS,and 21 cases of normal breast ductal epithelium tissues, and their correlations were analyzed.Results:The immunohistochemical staining showed that the expressions of shh,ptch and smo in normal ductal epithelium were completely absent or rare, but significantly higher in invasive ductal carcinoma (shh:74.8%, ptch:68.5%,smo:65.8%) and DCIS (shh:100%, ptch:100%, smo:90%) than in normal ductal epithelium (all P<0.001).In ductal carcinoma, shh protein expression rate was significantly higher in both of Ki67 and c-erbB2 positive groups than negative groups (all P<0.05), and was correlated to lymph node metastasis (P<0.05).Whereas the expression of shh, ptch and smo in breast cancer showed no correlation to patients'age, ER, PR, p53 protein expression, tissue grade, and clinical stage. Spearman correlation analysis showed that shh expression was positively correlated to ptch (r=0.55,P<0.01)and smo (r=0.58,P<0.01)expression,respectively; and ptch expression was positively correlated to smo expression (r=0.495,P<0.01).Conclusion:shh,ptch and smo protein overexpression might be a helpful marker for the early diagnosis of breast cancer, and the detection of shh might be helpful for indicating the prognosis of the breast cancer.