engleski

Can vascular endothelial growth factor expression compare to N-myc amplification as a prognostic factor in neuroblastoma patients?

Purpose/Objective: NMYC amplification (NMA) is considered the most important prognostic factor in neuroblastoma patients. However, approximately 70% of neuroblastoma patients do not show NMA and need other risk factors for stratification. Our objective was to establish correlation between NMA and vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) expression as predictors of survival in neuroblastoma patients. Materials and Methods: We analysed 54 neuroblastoma samples from patients aged from 2 months to 12 years, treated in the period from 1998 to 2008. We analysed the data according to age, sex, disease stage, histopathological subtype, NMA and VEGF expression. Duration of follow-up was 60 months. NMA analysis was performed using fluorescent in situ hybridisation (FISH). VEGF expression was determined using semi-quantitative scoring of immunohistochemically stained specimens. Results: We analysed NMA in 53 patients. We found 12 patients who were positive for NMA (22.6%) to have significantly reduced survival rates (p ¼ 0.0002). We investigated VEGF expression in 54 patients, where we observed 42 patients with high VEGF expression (77.8%). Patients with high VEGF expression showed significantly lower survival rates than patients with low VEGF expression (p ¼ 0.0053). All patients with low VEGF expression survived. Within the NMA negative group there was a variance in prognosis between patients with high and low VEGF expression (p ¼ 0.0290). All NMA negative patients with low VEGF expression survived, compared with 11 NMA negative patients with high VEGF expression (75.6%) who died. Conclusions: Our results indicate that VEGF expression together with NMA analysis might give additional information for the purposes of risk stratification in neuroblastoma patients. Other than known high-risk NMA positive patients, we might have discovered a group of high-risk NMA negative patients who exhibit high VEGF expression and possibly require a more intensive treatment approach. These results may indicate the need for a larger scale study

neuroblastoma ; N-myc ; VEGF

Document Type: Meeting Abstract