The Expression of SOX-9 in Oral Squamous Cell Carcinomas
Date Issued
2010
Date
2010
Author(s)
Yang, Fang-Yu
Abstract
Background:
SOX-9 plays an important role in many tissue differentiation processes, eg. chondrogenesis, male sex gonad differentiation, respiratory epithelim development, melanocyte differentiation, and the differentiation of the Paneth cells in guts. Also, numerous cancer studies focused on the influences of SOX-9, on colorectal cancer, prostate cancer, and ovarian cancer. Lots of the studies showed that the up-regulation of SOX-9 was correlated to the tumor growth and tumor cell metastasis, and the overexpression of SOX-9 indicated a poor prognosis. However, other studies pointed out that SOX-9 may act as a tumor repressor. So the role of SOX-9 in cancers was still equivocal. Until now, the relationship between SOX-9 and oral squamous cell carcinoma is unclear. Therefore, this study tried to elucidate the expression pattern of SOX-9 in OSCC and to correlate the expression of SOX-9 to the clinicopathological findings and long-term prognosis.
Material and Method:
In this study, we examined the expression of SOX-9 in 100 specimens of oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC), 61 specimens of oral epithelial dysplasia (OED), and 40 specimens of normal oral mucosa (NOM) by immunohistochemistry. The correlation between the expression of SOX-9 in OSCCs and clinicopathological parameters or the survival of OSCC patients was analyzed by ANOVA, Chi-square and Kaplan-Meier survival analysis. Univariate and multivariate analyses (Cox proportional hazard regression model) were used to find the correlation between expression of SOX-9 and clinicopathological parameters or survival, and tried to find out the independent predictors for the patients’ survival.
Results:
The labeling indices of SOX-9 significantly increased from NOM (4%, the lowest), through mild dysplasia (9%), moderate dysplasia (18%), and severe dysplasia (29%) to OSCC (48%) (p<0.001). The expression of SOX-9 was correlated with tumor size, lymph node status and clinical stage (p<0.05). Univariate analysis showed that tumor size, lymph node status, clinical stage and SOX-9 LI are related to the survival time (p<0.05). Multivariate analysis demonstrated that lymph node metastasis, clinical stage and SOX-9 LI were independent predictors for the patients’ survival (p<0.05).
Conclusion:
In this study, the expression of SOX-9 was significantly higher in OSCC than that in NOM and OED. In addition, SOX-9 was correlated with several clinical parameters and patients’ survival. SOX-9 may be a prognostic factor for OSCC patients.
Subjects
oral squamous cell carcinoma
oral epithelial dysplasia
SDGs
Type
thesis
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