Immunohistochemical expression of E-cadherin and CD44v6 in squamous cell carcinomas of the lower lip and tongue

Abstract

This study analyzed the immunohistochemical expression of E-cadherin and CD44v6 in 15 squamous cell carcinomas (SCCs) of lower lip and 15 SCCs of tongue in order to verify a possible association between these proteins and the anatomic location of the lesion, nodal metastasis and histological grading of malignancy. The pattern of expression and number of immunopositive cells were evaluated. The results were analyzed with the Fisher's exact test, Mann-Whitney test and Spearman's Correlation Coefficient (r). using the SPSS software 10.0 for Windows. Statistical significance was set at 5% determined for a p-value<0.05 for all tests. There was no significant difference (p>0.05) in the pattern of expression and number of immunopositive cells for E-cadherin and CD44v6, regarding the anatomical location and nodal metastasis. For the histological grading, low score SCCs showed higher immunopositivity for E-cadherin and CD44v6, both for the pattern of expression and number of immunopositive cells (p<0.05). There was a negative correlation between the total score of malignancy and the pattern of expression and number of immunopositive cells for E-cadherin and CD44v6 (p<0.05). In conclusion, SCCs of the lower lip and tongue did not reveal significant differences in the expression of E-cadherin and CD44v6. The expression of these adhesion molecules revealed association only with tumor histological grading of malignancy. Therefore, these results suggest that E-cadherin and CD44v6 may not help elucidating the differences between the biological behavior of SCCs of the lower lip and tongue.

Study of β-catenin, E-cadherin and vimentin in oral squamous cell carcinoma with and without lymph node metastases

“…Some studies have focussed on the invasive tumour front [33,38] while other studies have examined expression in random areas [24,36,37,39] within the tumour. It would, however, appear from the results in the present study and other studies on OSCC [16,17,25,27,28,35,36,39] that E-cadherin and β-catenin are probably not the key determinants for regional metastases in OSCC.…”

“…In some studies, a semi-quantitative estimation of the immunoreactive intensity was used [24,25,33,36,37] with varying percentage criteria, while other studies have not assessed expression according to the percentage of positively stained cells [38,39]. Moreover, the expression analysis has been carried out in different areas of the tumour by different investigators.…”

The biologic behavior of squamous cervical carcinoma after neoadjuvant therapy (NAT) according to immunohistochemical expression of E-cadherin and CD44v6

“…For the pattern of expression, the sections were quantified under light microscopy (×20 HPF) with a 4-point scoring system, as follows: 1 = absent; 2 = focal heterogeneous, 3 = reduced homogeneous; 4 = intense homogeneous. The number of immunopositive cells was assessed in five random fields (×40 HPF), using also a 4-point scoring system [8] …”

E-cadherin and c-Met expression in actinic cheilits and lip squamous cell carcinoma

“…Several studies demonstrate that reduction of E-cadherin expression occurs in oral dysplasia, with such reduction being proportional to the degree of dysplasia (5)(6)(7) . E-cadherin expression is frequently down-regulated in a wide variety of human malignancies, including skin cancer (8) , oral squamous carcinoma (4,7,(9)(10)(11) , lip SCC (12) , gastric cancer (13,14) , breast cancer (15) , lung cancer (16) , and prostate cancer (17) . Reduced E-cadherin expression has been shown to be an indicator of unfavorable prognosis in oral squamous cell carcinoma and in other malignancies (9,10,18) .…”