HE4 Tissue Expression as A Putative Prognostic Marker in Low-Risk/Low-Grade Endometrioid Endometrial Cancer: A Review

Abstract

Low-grade stage I endometrioid endometrial carcinomas should have an excellent prognosis, but a small subset of these cancers can relapse. The search for putative immunohistochemical prognostic markers for relapse in low-risk/low-grade endometrioid endometrial cancers remains open. Among the candidate molecules that may implicate the roles of immunohistochemical risk markers, we focused our attention on human epididymis protein 4 (HE4) after a review of the literature. Few authors have devoted themselves to this topic, and none have found a correlation between the tissue expression of HE4 and the molecular classification of endometrial cancer. Five different variants of HE4 mRNA and multiple protein isoforms of HE4 were identified many years ago, but current HE4 assays only measure the total HE4 expression and do not distinguish the different proteins encoded by different mRNA variants. It is important to have an approach to distinguish specific variants in the future.

HE4-based nomogram for predicting overall survival in patients with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis: construction and validation

“…The functions of HE4 mainly include participating in inflammatory reaction and inhibiting protease activity. HE4 may be closely related to the occurrence and progression of some malignant tumors [ 14 – 17 ]. Serum HE4 and CA-125 are two biomarkers approved by FDA for ovarian cancer [ 18 ].…”