Clinicopathological characteristics and chronology of p53 expression in the development of gastric cancer.

BACKGROUND/AIMS: The present study was aimed to investigate the correlation between selected clinicopathological characteristics and p53 protein overexpression, in Indian gastric cancer patients.

METHODOLOGY

Here, we studied specimens from 103 patients with gastric carcinomas and cases were categorized by AJCC-TNM classification. The p53 expression was analyzed in all the specimens by immunohistochemistry (IHC) and was correlated with the clinicopathological characteristics of the patients as well as etiological factors for gastric cancer. The cases were considered p53 overexpressed if more than 25% of the tumor cells were found to be expressing this protein.

RESULTS

We found significant association of p53 overexpression with the gender (p = 0.004) and histology grades (p = 0.001). However, p53 overexpression was not found to be significantly associated with other clinicopathological characteristics like age, cell differentiation, stage and location and various etiological factors.

CONCLUSIONS

Our observation showed that IHC-based detection of altered expression of p53 protein in gastric carcinomas may play an important role for diagnosing the progression of gastric carcinoma, even in the early stages.