Prognostic Significance of COX-2 and VEGF in Breast Cancer Patients Undergoing Neoadjuvant Chemotherapy

Abstract

In recent years, the incidence of breast cancer is signifcantly on the rise all over the world, hence, how to treat breast cancer, correctively evaluate the prognosis and find the postoperative recurrence of patients with breast cancer have been paid attention by more and more scholars all over the world. Biomarkers such as Cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) and vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) in tissue can be used as prognostic factors in many malignancies. To analyze the relationship between the expressions of COX-2 and VEGF and clinicopathological features in breast cancer, we examined the expressions and clinical significance of COX-2 and VEGF in breast carcinom tissue (n=128), and their relationships with chemosensitivity in breast carcinoma (n=52). The study demonstrated that before and after chemotherapy, the expression of COX-2 had changed significantly from 68.75% down to 33.56% (P<0.05). Before neoadjuvant chemotherapy, the chemosensitivity of COX-2 positive expression was worse than the chemosensitivity of that nagetive expression (P<0.05), for VEGF, there was no differences significantly (P>0.05). The over-expression of COX-2 and VEGF might be important biological markers for invasion and metastasis of breast carcinomas. COX-2 can be used as predictors of breast cancer chemosensitivity to help develop individualized chemotherapy.