Objective: To investigate the relationship between the expression of survivin and the clincopathological factors of colorectal carcinoma and evaluate the significance of survivin in prognostic assessment of the patients.
Methods: Using tissue microarray and immunohistochemical method (SABC), we examined survivin expression in 126 patients with advanced colorectal cancer and retrospectively analyzed the relationship between survivin and both the clinicopathological features and prognosis of the malignancy.
Result: Of the 126 patients, 26 (21%) were found to have a high survivin expression and 100 (79%) had a low expression, without relation to the patients' age, gender, tumor size, tumor location, histological type, lymph node metastasis and Dukes' classification. High survivin expression was strongly correlated with tumor recurrence and especially with hematogenous metastasis (P<0.05). Kaplan-Meier method and log-rank test indicated significantly different disease-free survival rates between high- and low-survivin groups (P<0.05), and Dukes' stage and survivin expression of the tumor were identified in multivariate analysis as the independent significant factors related to disease-free survival.
Conclusions: Survivin expression in colorectal cancer has strong positive correlation with tumor recurrence as the independent risk factor related to prognosis. Tissue microarray enables rapid, convenient, economic and accurate large-scale examination of clinical specimens.