No abstract

This study sought to reveal the significance of IL-6 in papillary thyroid carcinoma by determining its circulating levels, tumoral protein, and mRNA expressions. As compared to the healthy individuals, serum IL-6 was significantly higher in patients with benign thyroid diseases and PTC. Further, its level was significantly higher in PTC patients as compared to patients with benign thyroid diseases. ROC curves also confirmed a good discriminatory efficacy of serum IL-6 between healthy individuals and patients with benign thyroid diseases and PTC. The circulating IL-6 was significantly associated with poor overall survival in PTC patients. IL-6 immunoreactivity was significantly high in PTC patients as compared to the benign thyroid disease patients. Significantly higher IL-6 mRNA expression was also observed in the primary tumour tissues of PTC patients than the adjacent normal tissues. The protein expression of IL-6 at both the circulating and tissue level correlated with disease aggressiveness in PTC patients. Moreover, a significant positive correlation was observed between the IL-6 protein and mRNA expression in the primary tumours of PTC patients. Finally in conclusion, IL-6 has an important role in thyroid cancer progression. Thus targeting IL-6 signalling can help in clinical management of thyroid carcinoma patients.

Besides Dukes stage, multivariate analysis of all the studied molecular markers showed that patients expressing CD44 and cytokeratin-19 had a significantly reduced relapse-free and poor overall survival. Moreover, patients expressing both these markers (CD44 and cytokeratin-19) had the lowest significant relative risk for developing recurrence than patients with both markers negative when treated with surgery followed by adjuvant chemotherapy as compared with patients treated with surgery alone. Thus, in patients with colorectal cancer, immunohistochemical localization of CD44 and cytokeratin-19 may be included as a part of routine pathologic evaluation along with conventional prognostic factors.

These multiple approaches confirmed that prolactin is produced by colorectal carcinoma cells. Looking at its prognostic value and correlation with disease activity, it may provide new insights into treatment for patients with colorectal carcinoma.

These findings suggest that oncoprotein coexpression possesses significant prognostic and potential therapeutic value; incorporation of molecular markers into future prospective randomized trials is advisable.