Expression and clinical significance of VEGF-C and C-erbB-2 in breast cancer tissues

Objective To investigate the expression of vascular endothelial growth factor-C(VEGF-C) and initial cancer gene(C-erbB-2) in breast cancer tissue as well as their relationship with clinical pathological characteristics.Methods Immunohistochemical technique was used to detect the expression of VEGF-C and C-erbB-2 in 76 patients with breast cancer and 20 cases with benign breast lesions.Results A total of 72.37% patients were found with positive expression of VEGF-C and 51.31% patients with positive expression of C-erbB-2 in breast cancer tissues;in comparison to the positive expression rates in benign lesions,P0.05,there were statistically significant differences(P0.01).The positive expression of VEGF-C and C-erbB-2 bore no correlation ship with the age of the patients,the tumor size and histological classification of the cancer(P0.05),and correlated positively with the lymph node metastasis(P0.05 or 0.01);VEGF-C correlated positively with the clinical staging(P0.05).The expression of VEGF-C in breast cancer correlated positively with the expression of C-erbB-2(χ2=7.031,P0.01).Conclusions VEGF-C and C-erbB-2 play an important role in the oncogenesis and development of breast cancer,VEGF-C and C-erbB-2 may be used as markers for clinically predicting the prognosis of breast cancer.