Aims: To correlate astrocyte elevated gene-1 (AEG-1) expression with the clinicopathological features and outcome of patients with stages III-IV ovarian serous carcinoma, and to clinically assess the involvement of AEG-1 in acquired cisplatin resistance.
Methods and results: The frequency and intensity of immunohistochemical AEG-1 expression increased in a step-wise fashion from normal to chemosensitive to chemoresistant tissues. These observations were confirmed by Western blot analysis. AEG-1 expression level was correlated with lymph nodal metastasis, histological differentiation, residual tumour size and response to primary chemotherapy. Five-year progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS) rates were lower in the high-expression group than that in the low-expression group. AEG-1 overexpression was an independent but poor prognostic factor in the OS and PFS of these patients, as determined by multivariate Cox regression analysis. Multivariate logistic regression analysis revealed that the presence of cisplatin-based chemoresistance was significantly associated with expression level of AEG-1 and the degree of residual disease (P = 0.0001 and P = 0.0027, respectively).
Conclusion: Our findings indicate that tumour AEG-1 overexpression is associated with poor prognosis and cisplatin resistance in advanced serous ovarian cancer.
© 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.