Expression of platelet-derived endothelial cell growth factor correlates with good prognosis in patients with colorectal carcinoma

Prognostic relevance of tumour-associated macrophages and von Willebrand factor-positive microvessels in colorectal cancer

“…On the basis of the index of CD68 score minus von Willebrand factor (vWF) score, the patients with stage-II CRC could be separated into a "low-risk" and a "high-risk" group with respect to tumour-related death. Patients with an CD68-vWF score index of greater than 2 belonged to a "low-risk" group, and patients with an index of greater than 2 to a "high-risk" group as indicated by highly significant differences in long-term survival (log-rank test P=0.0003) the observation that macrophage infiltration is associated with a favourable outcome in CRC [44,58] support the hypothesis that TAM play a role in mediating an antitumour immune response.…”

“…Such an association was also reported for CRC by some investigators [3,11,23,25,29,34,53,54,57], but not confirmed by others [4,6,40,44]. The reason for this discrepancy is unclear; however, several factors may be responsible: for example, counting procedures for assessment of MVD were not standardised, different antibodies were used for immunohistochemistry and different numbers of microscopic fields, ranging from one to five fields per area of hot-spot angiogenesis of the tumours, were evaluated at different magnifications.…”

“…PD-ECGF expression in CRC correlated with TAM infiltration and MVD. In contrast, Saito et al [44] reported that PD-ECGF was mainly expressed by TAM, but PD-ECGF expression did not correlate with MVD. Results of another study [16] suggested that angiogenin is expressed by CRC cells in response to pro-inflammatory cytokines derived from TAM.…”

“…MVD has been shown to increase with progression from colonic adenoma to invasive carcinoma and has been associated with tumour size, lymphatic and venous blood vessel invasion and metastasis. Thus, MVD was regarded as an important prognostic factor by some investigators [3,11,23,25,34,53,54,57] but not by others [4,6,40,44].…”

“…Furthermore, macrophages can act as non-specific effector cells and directly destroy tumour cells [2]. Regarding CRC, a few reports suggest that dense macrophage and lymphocytic infiltration of the tumour tissue is associated with a favourable prognosis [26,35,42,44,58].…”