Relationship between microvessel density and telomerase activity in hepatocellular carcinoma

Abstract

MVD and telomerase activity may serve as diagnostic criteria of HCC in earlier stage. Meanwhile, there may be a cooperative effect between MVD and telomerase on the growth and metastasis of HCC.

Relationship between microvessel count and post-hepatectomy survival in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma

“…MVC was not associated with any clinicopathological factors or recurrence rate after hepatectomy in either the present study or our pilot study [17] . In contrast to our results, El-Assal et al [30] and other investigators [6,14,15,[30][31][32] have reported that microvessel density in HCC is increased in larger tumors, tumors with poor differentiation and cirrhotic patients, while higher microvessel density is associated with intra-hepatic recurrence. In the present study, however, MVC did not correlate with co-existing cirrhosis or with various etiological factors related to chronic hepatitis such as viral status.…”

“…The role of MVC for tumor relapse or progression might not be particularly strong. This result contradicts findings in other reports described above [6,14,16,30,31] . As explained above, HCC naturally acquires rich tumor vascularity in the early stages and most clinically treated HCCs represent tumor with radiological enhancement [34,35,38] .…”

“…Levels of angiogenic factors such as vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) or basic fibroblast growth factor (b-FGF) are increased in HCC and might affect patient survival [12,13] . Recent studies have also shown that microvessel density (MVD) in HCC or noncancerous liver surrounding tumor correlates with tumor aggressiveness and prognosis [6,[14][15][16] . We have previously provided a preliminary demonstration of the comprehensive analysis of various biological factors, revealing that microvessel count (MVC) using CD34 antibody was independently associated with poor prognosis in HCC patients undergoing hepatic resection by multivariate analysis [17] .…”

Telomerase activity (TMA) in tumour and peritumoural tissues in a rat liver cancer model

“…We found that there was no difference in intratumoural TMA levels detected at different time points of tumour growth suggesting that TMA levels in tumour tissue are independent of tumour size. This is similar to the results of Piao et al, 18 who found no correlation with TMA activity and tumour size. However, we found that TMA in the peritumoural tissue increased with time, along with the growth of the implanted tumour.…”

Significance of Cytoplasmic Expression of Telomerase Reverse Transcriptase in Patients with Hepatocellular Carcinoma Undergoing Liver Resection

“…19 On the other hand, another report showed that telomerase activation was signi cantly related to the poor tumor differentiation of HCC tumors. 24 In thyroid cancer, TERT promoter mutation was frequently observed in poorly differentiated tumors. 25 The role of TERT is not only the acquisition of tumor immortality, but also interactions with several oncogenic pathways such as the Wnt/beta-catenin signal pathway and p53 suppression.…”