Background & objective: Survivin is a newly identified apoptosis inhibitor. Studies indicated that Survivin over-expressed in malignant tumors. This study was designed to evaluate the expression of Survivin in colon cancer,and the correlation of its expression to clinical characteristics and prognosis of patients with colon cancer.
Methods: Expression of Survivin protein was investigated by immunohistochemistry in 12 cases of normal colon tissues,and 79 cases of colon cancer tissues without the history of radiotherapy or chemotherapy.
Results: Expression of Survivin was detected in 78.5%(62/79) of colon cancer tissues,higher than that in tumor nests adjacent tissues, which was 32.9% (26/79). In contrast, normal colon tissues did not express Survivin. There was no relationship between the expression of Survivin and age, sex, blood type, serum CEA level, lymph node metastasis, histological grade, infiltration degree, and Dukes' stage(P >0.05). When 25% was used as the cut-off point between high and low expression of Survivin, 3-year overall survival rate of low expression group (63.56%) was much higher than that of high expression group (39.96%) (P=0.04). Cox proportional hazards model analysis showed that Dukes' stage, and high expression of Survivin were the only 2 prognosis factors influenced the survival times (Wald values were 24.225, and 5.504, respectively, P values were 0.000, and 0.019, respectively).
Conclusions: There is a high expression level of Survivin in colon cancer, it may play an important role in tumorgenesis and development of colon cancer. Over-expression of Survivin was related with poor prognosis, it may be a potential prognostic index.