The aim of the study was to find correlations between MMP/TIMP reactivity and the expression of angiogenic factors, and relationships between these parameters and clinicopathological features of gastric cancer patients. Receiver Operating Characteristic curve analysis was used to find cut-off points that enabled fair decision-making in survival analysis. Low levels of MMP-2 expression in tumor and stromal compartments were significantly associated with poor prognosis-the probability that a patient would die within 60 months of surgery if their MMP-2 was low, and was about 0.8 in both neoplastic and stromal compartments.
Keywords: Biostatistics; Cancer biomarkers; Carcinogenesis; Stomach cancer.