The Research In The Expression And Its Associated Clinical Significance Of MUC2 In Colon Carcinomas

Objective: Colorectal cancer is the third most common type among the prevalent cancers and a major cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide.Early stage diagnosis and therapy plays a key role in the survival rate of colon cancer’s victims. It has been recognized that the role of mucins is important in the development of colon cancer. Now mucins have become a hot topic in current colon cancer research. The research aims to discuss the expression of MUC2 in normal colon tissue, colon adenomas and colon carcinomas, and the relation between the expression of MUC2 and its associated clinical data, and to find a key target for the diagnosis and therapy for the colon cancer. Methods: A total of 121 colon cancer tissue were obtained from the affiliate hospital of Guilin Medical University,15 normal colon mucosas and 41 adenomas were selected from the above randomly. The Patients didn’t receive any form of treatment like chemotherapy before operation. The expression of MUC2 in normal colon mucosas, adenomas and colon cancer tissue were detected with immunohistochemistry staining. At the same time, the clinicopathologic data has been collected. The SPSS 20.0 edition was used for analysis. The Chi-square test was used for comparison of data between the two groups. P-value < 0.05 was considered statistically significant. Results:(1) The high expression rate of MUC2 in normal colon tissue, colon adenomas and colon carcinomas were100%(15/15), 73.17%(30/41) and 46.28%(56/121), respectively.(2) The frequency of low MUC2 expression was significantly different among tumors with Well/moderate and poor differentiation compared with high expression(P <0.05). The low expression of MUC2 cases also demonstrated significantly increased lymph node metastasis(P<0.05) and tumor stage(P<0.05), compared with high expression of MUC2 cases.(3) This study did not find relationships between low MUC2 expression cases and high MUC2 expression cases for tumor size, lymphatic invasion, venous invasion and gender. Conclusions:(1)The high expression rate of MUC2 in normal colon tissue, colon adenomas and colon carcinomas showed an decreasing trend. It can be seen that the expression of MUC2 may play an important role in prediction of colon cancer and in the mechanism of tumorigenesis.(2) The expression of MUC2 has a close relationship with pathological factors in colon carcinomas. The colon cancer patients with low expression of MUC2 is associated with lower histological grade, lymph node metastasis and poor tumor stage.(3)As is indicated that the relationships between MUC2 expression with tumor size, lymphatic invasion,venous invasion and gender is not clear. And that relationship may need further discussion.(4) The down-regulation of MUC2 expression may be play a role in carcinogenesis, progression, invasion, metastasis and other process. The expression of MUC2 may turn to be a key role in the early diagnosis, treatment and prognosis judgment in colon cancer.