ABSTRACT
Objective To investigate the relationship between contactin (CNTN)-1 and vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF)-C expression levels and the recurrence,metastasis and prognosis of hepatocellular carcinoma(HCC) patients after liver transplantation.Methods Clinical data and pathological specimen of 105 patients diagnosed with primary HCC undergoing orthotopic liver transplantation were collected.The expression levels of CNTN-1 and VEGF-C in the cancerous and para-cancerous liver tissues were quantitatively measured by immunohistochemical staining.The relationship between the CNTN-1 and VEGF-C expression levels and clinicopathological characteristics,postoperative recurrence,metastasis and prognosis was statistically analyzed.Results The high expression rate of CNTN-1 and VEGF-C in liver cancerous tissues was 46.7％ and 39.0％,significantly higher compared with 11.4％ and 19.0％ in the para-cancerous tissues (both P＜0.05).Spearman correlation analysis revealed that the expression level of CNTN-1 was positively correlated with that of VEGF-C (P＜0.005).X2 test demonstrated that the expression of CNTN-1 protein was positively correlated with the level of alpha fetoprotein (AFP) (P=0.017),tumor,node,metastasis (TNM) staging(all P＜0.001),and negatively correlated with the degree of differentiation (P＜0.001).High expression of VEGF-C was positively correlated with TNM staging (P＜0.001).Cox multivariate analysis revealed that overall survival rate was significantly correlated with gender,AFP,degree of tumor differentiation,microvascular invasion,tumor diameter and high expression of CNTN-1 (P＜0.05-0.001).The recurrence-free survival was correlated with TNM staging,envelope integrity and high CNTN-1 expression (P＜0.05-0.001).Kaplan-Meier survival analysis revealed that postoperative overall survival curve and recurrence-free survival curve significantly differed between patients with high and low expression levels of CNTN-1 (both P＜0.01).Recurrence-free survival curve significantly differed between patients with high and low expression levels of VEGF-C (P=0.005).Conclusions CNTN-1 protein is highly expressed in HCC tissues and correlated with the expression of VEGF-C.It is associated with postoperative recurrence and metastasis of HCC after liver transplantation and affects the clinical prognosis of patients.