Title:Aberrant β-catenin Activity in Hepatoid Adenocarcinoma of the Stomach
Volume: 21
Issue: 8
Author(s): Nan Wang, Rui Kong, Wei Han and Jie Lu*
Affiliation:
- Department of Gastroenterology, Shanghai Tenth People's Hospital, Tongji University School of Medicine, Shanghai 200072,China
Keywords:
Gastric, hepatoid, adenocarcinoma, β-catenin, alpha-fetoprotein, hepatocellular carcinoma,
conventional gastric adenocarcinoma.
Abstract:
Background: Hepatoid adenocarcinoma of the stomach (HAS) has been
recognized as a rare primary gastric tumor characterized by hepatocellular carcinomalike
histology. HAS often causes diagnostic confusion with conventional gastric
adenocarcinoma (CGA) due to the difficulty to detect hepatoid differentiation solely
based on findings from hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) staining. β-catenin is highly
expressed in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), which is involved in the maintenance of
tumor initiating cells, drug resistance, tumor progression, and metastasis. Due to the
scarcity of confirmed cases of HAS, there are few studies on β-catenin.
Objective: 14 patients diagnosed in our hospital were selected.
Methods: The clinical characteristics of 14 patients were statistically studied, and
pathological specimens were analyzed by immunohistochemistry.
Results: We detected statistically significant difference in the expression of β-catenin (P
= 0.000), glypican3 (P = 0.019), and hepar-1 (P = 0.007) between HAS cancer tissues
and normal tissues. Furthermore, a significant correlation was found between the
expression of β-catenin in HAS cancer tissue and normal tissue (Pearson correlation
coefficient: 0.686, P = 0.007). Meanwhile, a significant correlation was observed
between the expression of β-catenin and survival time (Spearman correlation
coefficient= - 0.482, P = 0.003). However, we found the expression of β-catenin did not
correlate with the tumor differentiation and size, age, gender, serum AFP levels,
microinvasion, and metastasis (P > 0.05).
Conclusion: Our findings establish β-catenin as a useful marker that can distinguish
HAS from CGA and may improve the early diagnosis to guide the appropriate and timely
treatment of HAS patients.
