Background: AT-rich interactive domain 3A (ARID3A) is a member of the ARID family of DNA-binding proteins. Previous reports have shown that ARID3A controls cell growth in a p53-dependent manner. Recently, it has been reported that expression of the ARID3A protein was markedly increased in colon cancer tissue compared with matched normal colonic mucosa. However, little is currently known about the role of ARID3A in colorectal cancer (CRC). The aim of this study was to investigate the clinical significance of ARID3A expression in CRC.
Methods: We examined ARID3A expression in 690 CRC patients using tissue microarray and immunohistochemistry. Kaplan-Meier analysis and Cox proportional hazard models were used to estimate the impact of ARID3A expression on overall survival.
Results: Of the 690 cases, 195 tumors were strongly positive for ARID3A, 187 were weakly positive, and 308 were negative. ARID3A expression in CRC was significantly correlated with age, degree of differentiation, depth of invasion, lymph node metastasis, distant metastasis, tumor-node-metastasis stage, status of microsatellite instability, and carcinoembryonic antigen levels. The overall survival of CRC patients with strong ARID3A expression was significantly longer than that of patients with weak or negative ARID3A expression. We also performed an additional survival analysis on 388 colon cancer patients and 302 rectal cancer patients. In doing so, a favorable prognostic effect of ARID3A expression was revealed only in the colon cancer group (p = 0.002), not in rectal cancer. Moreover, we showed that the effect of ARID3A on the survival was correlated with p53 status. Using multivariate analysis, we found that strong expression of ARID3A was an independent predictor for better prognosis in CRC.
Conclusions: Our data suggested that strong expression of ARID3A may predict a good prognosis in patients with CRC.