To investigate the prognostic role of stomatin-like protein 2 (STOML2) in cervical cancer.

The expression of STOML2 in 8 pairs of cervical cancer and adjacent normal cervical tissues were detected by Real-time PCR. Immunohistochemistry was performed to evaluation of STOML2 expression in 94 paraffin-embedded cervical cancer samples. The correlation between STOML2 expression and cervical cancer progression and prognosis was analyzed statistically.

STOML2 expression was upregulated in cervical cancer tissues compared with adjacent normal cervical tissues. Of the 94 cervical cancer cases, high STOML2 expression was detected in 54 cases (57.4%). STOML2 expression was significantly related to tumor stage (P = 0.013) and tumor size (P = 0.025). Moreover, patients with high expression of STOML2 had a significant shorter overall survival and recurrent free survival time compared with those with low STOML2 expression in cervical cancer (P = 0.001 and P = 0.017, respectively). Multivariate analysis revealed that STOML2 was an independent prognostic factor (P = 0.022) for the overall survival in cervical cancer.

Our study showed STOML2 was correlated to progression in cervical cancer, and implicated it as a potential predictive factor for the prognosis of cervical cancer.