Can TROP2 be used as a prognostic marker in endometrioid endometrial carcinoma?

BACKGROUND

Endometrioid-type endometrial carcinoma is the most common malignancy of the female genital tract in developed countries. The prognosis greatly depends on the grade and stage of the disease.

AIMS

In some patients, the disease recurs in a short time after the surgical/medical therapy. Hence, it is important to predict the patients who will have worse prognosis at the beginning, to choose the appropriate treatment; resuming the search of new prognostic markers. Therefore, our study aimed to detect trophoblast cell surface antigen 2 (TROP2) as a new prognostic marker.

SETTINGS AND DESIGN

The patients who underwent a hysterectomy and diagnosed with endometrioid-type endometrial carcinoma were evaluated retrospectively and TROP2 immunostain was performed to their tumoral slides.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

We evaluated TROP2 expressions in 102 patients immunohistochemically who underwent hysterectomy with the diagnosis of endometrioid-type endometrial carcinoma histopathologically and correlated them with the other generally accepted prognostic parameters.

STATISTICAL ANALYSIS

The Kolmogorov-Smirnov test and Q-Q plot test were used to verify the normality of the distribution of continuous variables. The Chi-square/Fisher's exact tests were used for categorical variables. Analyses were performed with SPSS Statistics for Windows, Version 20.

RESULTS

High overexpression of TROP2 was seen in larger, higher-grade, deeper-invasive tumors, tumors with vascular invasion, and pelvic-lymph-node metastasis. These results were statistically significant (P ≤ 0.05).

CONCLUSION

Overexpression of TROP2 in endometrioid-type endometrial carcinoma seems to be a poor prognostic factor; it may be useful in determining the biologically more aggressive tumors before the treatment. This early determination is very important to choose the appropriate surgery, adjuvant-treatments, and follow-up.