Lo Muzio Lorenzo, Santoro Angela, Pieramici Tiziana, Bufo Pantaleo, Di Alberti Luca, Mazzotta Piergiorgio, Mazzotta Alessandro, Carinci Francesco, Rubini Corrado, Lo Russo Lucio
Department of Surgical Sciences, University of Foggia, Italy.
Anal Quant Cytol Histol. 2010 Apr;32(2):70-7.
To study the main processes involved in oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC): apoptosis and inflammation.
The immunohistochemical expression of bcl-2, CD3, CD20, CD45 and CD68 were studied by standard linked streptavidin-biotin horseradish peroxidase technique in 21 paraffin-embedded OSCC specimens in order to establish their possible correlation with the degree of tumoral differentiation.
A trend was observed for the association of inflammatory infiltrate with the degree of tumor differentiation: well and moderately differentiated tumors tend to be associated to a dense inflammatory infiltrate (57.9% of cases), while poorly differentiated cancers seem to be associated to a low inflammatory infiltrate in 85.7% of cases. The most expressed molecule was CD68, followed by CD45, CD20 and CD3. Bcl-2 was low or moderately expressed, and immunostaining was more diffuse in moderately or poorly differentiated oral cancers.
Inflammatory infiltrate and the degree of OSCC differentiation may be linked, but the specific role still remains unclear.