Expression of Standard CD44 in Advanced Gastric Cancer: Relationship with Metastasis to Lymph Nodes

Abstract

IntroductionGastric cancer is the second most common cause of cancer related mortality worldwide 1 . Complete surgical resection, the only potentially curative treatment for advanced gastric cancer, can only be performed on a small subgroup of patients. In 30 to 50 of patients undergoing surgical exploration, the intent of the surgery is to cure the patient. However, almost 60 of patients who undergo an R0 curative resection relapse and die of their disease 2, 3 .Clinical staging is determined using TNM classi cation : T indicating depth of invasion of the primary tumor, N nodal metastasis, and M distant metastasis. This classi cation system is useful to estimate patient prognosis. Currently, endoscopic ultrasound EUS and computed tomography CT are widely used for preoperative tumor staging 4 . The accuracy of 58 / 98 of tumors. CD44s expression showed no signi cant relationship with patient age or gender, or tumor location, size or macroscopic / microscopic classi cation. However, CD44s expression showed a signi cantly negative relationship with metastasis to lymph nodes p 0.0001 . Thus, in T2-T3 gastric cancer, loss of CD44s expression suggests that metastasis of the tumor to lymph nodes is likely.