Expression of e-cadherin with correlation to clinicopathologic parameters in oral squamous cell carcinoma

ABSTRACT

It becomes more concerned that the cell adhesion molecule plays an important role in the process of malignant transformation and tumor behaviors including invasive growth and metastasis. It is postulated if the expression of adhesion molecule is reduced in tumor tissue, the tumor cell will be undifferentiated and lose their cell adhesion ability and polarity. So the tumor cells lost the adhesion of cell to cell and to basement membrane that they became more aggressive. Reduced cadherin expression enhances invasiveness through infiltrative growth and metastasis of tumor cells is well known and mostly accepted in many epithelia tumors. We explored the expression of E-cadherin by immunohistochemical staining in 50 oral squamous cell carcinomas and investigated the correlation between the expression of E-cadherin and clinicopathologic parameters and prognosis. The expression of E-cadherin was reduced in 40/50(80%) of primary tumors, and 21/22(95.5%) of lymph nodes. The reduced expression of the E-cadherin was associated with lymph node metastasis(P=0.029), invasive mode(P=0.030) and marginal status(P=0.038). Survival analysis showed that predictive period of E-cadherin reduced group(37 months) was lower than that of E-cadherin preserved group(60 months), but there was no statistical significant difference.