From the Department of Respiratory Medicine, School of Medicine (Drs Ryuge, Katono, and Masuda); Department of Molecular Diagnostics, School of Allied Health Sciences (Dr Sato); Kitasato Clinical Research Center, School of Medicine (Dr Wang); Department of Cellular and Histo-Pathology, Graduate School of Medical Sciences (Mr Matsumoto); Department of Pathology, School of Medicine (Dr Jiang); and Department of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, School of Medicine (Dr Satoh), Kitasato University; Department of Thoracic Surgery, National Hospital Organization Sagamihara National Hospital (Dr Inoue), Kanagawa, Japan.
Chest. 2010 Sep 9.
Nestin is a class VI intermediate filament protein expressed in stem/progenitor cells during central nervous system development. Nestin expression has been detected in many kinds of tumors and reported in a recent small-scale study in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). We investigated the relationships between nestin expression and clinicopathological parameters and determined its prognostic significance concerning survival in patients with resected NSCLCs.
Nestin expression in tumor cells was immunohistochemically studied in 171 consecutive patients with NSCLC, and associations with clinicopathological parameters were evaluated. Kaplan-Meier survival analysis and Cox proportional hazards models were used to estimate the effect of nestin expression on survival.
Nestin expression was observed in 27 of the 171 (15.8%) NSCLCs. Nestin only had cytoplasmic expression. Clinicopathologically, nestin expression was significantly associated with squamous cell carcinoma (P = .001), poorer differentiation (P = .007), lymph node metastasis (P = .008), intratumoral vascular invasion (P = .003), intratumoral lymphatic invasion (P = .008), pleural invasion (P = .039), and poorer prognosis (P < .001). Multivariable analysis confirmed that nestin expression increased the hazard of death after adjusting for other clinicopathological factors (HR= 2.75; 95% CI, 1.39-5.46).
The present study suggests that nestin expression is a prognostic indicator of poorer survival probability for patients with resected NSCLCs and may be used as a potential marker to select patients who should receive adjuvant chemotherapy.
PMID: 20829334 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher] Source: National Library of Medicine.
