Lv Yin, Yang Lin, Wang Fan
Department of Radiotherapy, The First Affiliated Hospital of Anhui Medical University, 281 Jixi Road, Hefei, 230022, Anhui, People's Republic of China.
Med Oncol. 2015 May;32(5):155. doi: 10.1007/s12032-015-0597-8. Epub 2015 Apr 3.
Aldehyde dehydrogenase 1 (ALDH-1) is a cancer stem cell marker whose overexpression can predict the prognosis of several human cancers. In this study, we assessed ALDH-1 expression in cervical cancer tissues and investigated the usefulness of ALDH-1 expression levels for the prediction of patient response to chemoradiation therapy and survival. Tissue samples from 74 patients were examined via immunostaining with ALDH-1 antibody before and after chemoradiation therapy. Twenty-nine of the 74 cervical cancer cases exhibited ALDH-1 expression (39.19 %) in the pre-treatment tissue samples; however, only 19 of these 39 cases exhibited ALDH-1 expression (48.72 %) in post-treatment tissue samples, indicating that chemoradiotherapy eliminated the ALDH-1 positive tumor stem cells in cervical cancer. However, patient disease-free survival was not associated with ALDH-1 expression (11.78 ± 1.95 vs. 12.50 ± 1.91 months in ALDH-1-positive and -negative tumors, respectively). This study indicates that the reduction of the cancer stem cell population via chemoradiotherapy may not be sufficient to improve patient survival. Thus, the clinical value of ALDH-1 expression in cervical cancer may need to be re-examined.
醛脱氢酶1（ALDH-1）是一种癌症干细胞标志物，其过表达可预测多种人类癌症的预后。在本研究中，我们评估了宫颈癌组织中ALDH-1的表达情况，并研究了ALDH-1表达水平对预测患者放化疗反应及生存情况的作用。对74例患者的组织样本在放化疗前后用ALDH-1抗体进行免疫染色检查。74例宫颈癌病例中，有29例（39.19%）在治疗前组织样本中表现出ALDH-1表达；然而，这39例中只有19例（48.72%）在治疗后组织样本中表现出ALDH-1表达，这表明放化疗消除了宫颈癌中ALDH-1阳性肿瘤干细胞。然而，患者的无病生存期与ALDH-1表达无关（ALDH-1阳性和阴性肿瘤患者的无病生存期分别为11.78±1.95个月和12.50±1.91个月）。本研究表明，通过放化疗减少癌症干细胞数量可能不足以提高患者生存率。因此，可能需要重新审视ALDH-1表达在宫颈癌中的临床价值。
