Tumor Expression of the Carcinoembryonic Antigen Correlates with High Mitotic Activity and Cell Pleomorphism Index in Lung Carcinoma

Abstract

At present, some research efforts are focusing on the evaluation of a variety of tumor associated antigens (TAAs) for a better understanding of tumor biology and genetics of lung tumors. For this reason, we evaluated the tissue expression of carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) and ior C2 (a cell surface O-linked glycoprotein carbohydrate chain TAA) in lung carcinomas, as well as its correlation with a variety of clinicopathological features. The tissue expression of CEA was evidenced in 22/43 (51.16%) lung carcinomas and it was correlated with mitotic activity, cell pleomorphism indexes, and age of patients. The expression of ior C2 was observed in 15/43 (34.88%) tumors but no correlation with the clinicopathological features mentioned above was obtained. No correlation between both CEA and ior C2 antigens expression and the overall survival (OS) of non-small-cell lung cancer patients was also observed. However, CEA-negative patients displayed higher OS rates as compared with positive ones (69.74 versus 58.26 months). Our results seem to be in agreement with the role of CEA expression in tumor cell proliferation, inhibition of cell polarizations and tissue architecture distortion. The significance of ior C2 antigen in these malignancies and it potential use in diagnosis, prognosis, and/or immunotherapy must be reevaluated.

Flow Cytometric Measurement of Aneuploid DNA Content Correlates with High S-Phase Fraction and Poor Prognosis in Patients with Non-Small-Cell Lung Cancer

“…The evaluation of some morphological parameters such as histopathological classification, grade of differentiation, degree of cell pleomorphism, and necrosis index was performed for an expert pathologist (Charles E. Rengifo) in each tumor tissue using hematoxylin and eosin (H/E) staining as it was previously described in [15]. Briefly, differences in some cytomorphologic characteristics such as cell and nuclear sizes, cellular shape, chromatin pattern, nucleoli, and amount of cytoplasm were considered to express the degree of cell pleomorphism which was scored as follows: low, moderate and high cell pleomorphism.…”