Overexpression of POSTN in Tumor Stroma Is a Poor Prognostic Indicator of Colorectal Cancer

BACKGROUND: Tumor microenvironment has recently drawn attention in that it is related with tumor prognosis. Cancer-associated fibroblast also plays a critical role in cancer invasiveness and progression in colorectal cancers. Periostin (POSTN), originally identified to be expressed in osteoblasts and osteoblast-derived cells, is expressed in cancer-associated fibroblasts in several tissue types of cancer. Recent studies suggest an association between stromal overexpression of POSTN and poor prognosis of cancer patients. METHODS: We analyzed colorectal cancer cases for their expression status of POSTN in tumor stroma using immunohistochemistry and correlated the expression status with clinicopathological and molecular features. RESULTS: High level of POSTN expression in tumor stroma was closely associated with tumor location in proximal colon, infiltrative growth pattern, undifferentiated histology, tumor budding, luminal necrosis, and higher TNM stage. High expression status of POSTN in tumor stroma was found to be an independent prognostic parameter implicating poor 5-year cancer-specific survival and 5-year progression-free survival. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings suggest that POSTN overexpression in tumor stroma of colorectal cancers could be a possible candidate marker for predicting poor prognosis in patients with colorectal cancers.

Analysis of clinicopathological characters for IgG4-related disease / 临床与实验病理学杂志

Purpose To study the clinicopathological features and immunohistochemical characteristics of IgG4-related disease. Meth-ods The microscopic characteristics and immunohistochemical staining (EnVision) of IgG, IgG4, CD138 and CD34 have been per-formed on 12 cases of IgG4-related disease. Results IgG4-related disease were characterized by diffuse fibrosis, accompanied with in-filtrating of dense lymphocytes and plasma cells surrounding neurovascular and occlusive phlebitis. Immunohistochemical staining re-sults showed the ratio of IgG4+/IgG+ cells were over 40%. Conclusions IgG4-related disease is absent of characteristic clinical and radiographic features and is easily misdiagnosed as tumor. Preoperative serum IgG4 detection could be used as the prior examina-tion for the suspected cases.