Expression of a mesenchymal marker N-cadherin in nasopharyngeal carcinoma and its clinical significance

Purpose To investigate the aberrant expression of N-cadherin in nasopharyngeal carcinoma(NPC) and its prognostic significance.Methods Immunohistochemical staining for N-cadherin protein was performed on 122 NPC patients,and 30 chronic nasopharyngitis was used as normal controls.Results The high expression of N-cadherin was observed in 59.0%(72/122) of NPC tissues,whereas it was only expressed in 3.33%(1/30) of chronic nasopharyngitis(P0.001).High expression of N-cadherin was associated with a majority of the clinicopathologic variables,including gender,lymph node metastasis,clinical stage and local recurrence.However,N-cadherin expression was not significantly associated with age,histological type,N stage and M stage(P0.05).In addition,N-cadherin expression correlated negatively with E-cadherin in tumors(P=0.029).In univariate analysis,the overall survival was significantly shorter in patients with high N-cadherin expression than low staining(P=0.006),though it was not an independent prognostic marker for NPC patients by multivariate analysis(P=0.296).Conclusions N-cadherin is highly expressed in NPC and correlated strongly with lymph node metastasis,clinical stage and local recurrence,which may be used as a valuable prognostic marker for NPC patients.