Expression of the phosphorylated MEK5 protein is associated with TNM staging of colorectal cancer

BMC Cancer

Bang Hu¹  Donglin Ren¹  Dan Su¹  Hongcheng Lin¹  Zhenyu Xian¹  Xingyang Wan¹  Junxiao Zhang¹  Xinhui Fu¹  Li Jiang³  Dechan Diao²  Xinjuan Fan¹  Lei Wang¹  Jianping Wang¹ 

[1] The Sixth Affiliated Hospital, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, Guangdong 510655, China

[2] Guangdong Provincial Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Guangzhou, Guangdong 520120, China

[3] Shenzhen people's Hospital, Shenzhen 518035, China

Others  :  1080480
DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2407-12-127

 received in 2011-12-05, accepted in 2012-03-30,  发布年份 2012

【 摘 要 】

Background

Activation of MEK5 in many cancers is associated with carcinogenesis through aberrant cell proliferation. In this study, we determined the level of phosphorylated MEK5 (pMEK5) expression in human colorectal cancer (CRC) tissues and correlated it with clinicopathologic data.

Methods

pMEK5 expression was examined by immunohistochemistry in a tissue microarray (TMA) containing 335 clinicopathologic characterized CRC cases and 80 cases of nontumor colorectal tissues. pMEK5 expression of 19 cases of primary CRC lesions and paired with normal mucosa was examined by Western blotting. The relationship between pMEK5 expression in CRC and clinicopathologic parameters, and the association of pMEK5 expression with CRC survival were analyzed respectively.

Results

pMEK5 expression was significantly higher in CRC tissues (185 out of 335, 55.2%) than in normal tissues (6 out of 80, 7.5%; P < 0.001). Western blotting demonstrated that pMEK5 expression was upregulated in 12 of 19 CRC tissues (62.1%) compared to the corresponding adjacent nontumor colorectal tissues. Overexpression of pMEK5 in CRC tissues was significantly correlated to the depth of invasion (P = 0.001), lymph node metastasis (P < 0.001), distant metastasis (P < 0.001) and high preoperative CEA level (P < 0.001). Consistently, the pMEK5 level in CRC tissues was increased following stage progression of the disease (P < 0.001). Analysis of the survival curves showed a significantly worse 5-year disease-free (P = 0.002) and 5-year overall survival rate (P < 0.001) for patients whose tumors overexpressed pMEK5. However, in multivariate analysis, pMEK5 was not an independent prognostic factor for CRC (DFS: P = 0.139; OS: P = 0.071).

Conclusions

pMEK5 expression is correlated with the staging of CRC and its expression might be helpful to the TNM staging system of CRC.

【 授权许可】

   
2012 Hu et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.

【 图 表 】

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