| Objective:Esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) is a kind of malignant digestive tract disease with high morbidy and mortality, and our country is one of the most common places with a high incidence of ESCC. Despite the improvement in the diagnostic level and utilization of combined treatment modalities in recent years, the prognosis of ESCC patients remains poor. Recent studies have shown that the aberrant expression of interferon-induced transmembrane protein 3 (IFITM3)is implicated in the lymph node metastasis of many malignancies. Our research aimed to investigate the expression of IFITM3 in pathological NO (pNO) esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC), and its relationship with the lymph node metastatic recurrence of ESCC patients after surgery.Methods:From January 2008 to January 2010, patients with midthoracic ESCC who underwent Ivor-Lewis esophagectomy with two-field lymphadenectomy in our department (Provincial Hospital Affiliated to Shandong University, China) were eligible for this study. In total,this study enrolled 104 patients, including 83 men and 21 women. Immunohistochemistry (IHC) was used to examine the expression profile of IFITM3 protein in 104 pairs of samples.Each pair consistedof ESCC tissue and its adjacent normal mucosa (ANM). This aberrant expression was verified by reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) with 20tumor specimens with strong immunostaining and their mucosal tissues. In addition,20 samples of low expression tissues and their ANMs were evaluated. Moreover, The recurrence curves and survival curves were calculatedby the Kaplan-Meier method. Univariate log-rank test and Cox regression analysiswere respectively performed to evaluate the recurrence risk and prognostic factors.Asatatistically significant difference was represented by a two-tailed p value less than 0.05.Results:The outcome of IHC was demonstrated that the positive expression of IFITM3 was presented as yellow or brownish yellow staining in the cytoplasm of the tumor cell. However, there is no or light staining in thecytoplasm with negativeexpressed tissue and undetected staining in ANM tissue. In addition, according to the outcome of immunohistochemistrical staining, we divided all the patients into overpressed group (59 cases) and low expressed group (45 cases). Then, we also analyze the clinicopathological characteristics and recurrent status of individuals with ESCC. The outcome showed a significant correlation of IFITM3 expression with the T status of esophageal cancer (p=0.015). Furthermore, a total of 42 cases (40.4%) were confirmed to have first lymph node metastatic recurrence within 3 years, in which IFITM3 overexpression was detected in 30 patients (71.4%). In the low IFITM3 expression group, the 3-year lymphatic recurrence rate was only 26.7%. Conversely, in the overexpression groupthis rate reached up to 50.8% Moreover, the 3-year OS rate of patients with IFITM3 protein overexpression and low expression were respectively 64.4% and 88.9%. IFITM3 was demonstrated to be not only an important risk factor of lymphatic metastatic recurrence but a significant prognostic factor in pNO ESCC (p< 0.05).Conclusions:The differential expressed of IFITM3 was found in human ESCC tissue. And its expression level has a close relationship with T status of tumor. In addition, IFITM3 expression level and Tstatus of tumor are both independent recurrent risk of patients with ESCC after surgery. So this gene may be also play an important role in ESCC and could be a predictor of lymphatic metastatic recurrence in pNO ESCC after Ivor-Lewis esophagectomy with two field lymphadenectomy. |
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