Prognosis in carcinoma of the uterine cervix appears to be influenced by multiple factors (the size of primary tumor, nodal status, deep invasion into cervical stroma, histologic grade etc) that are frequently interrelated. Recently other new
factors
may have been proposed as prognostic factors in cervical cancer, such as number of cells in S―phase, or activation of c―Ha―ras and c―myc protooncogenes. It has been suggested that c―myc proto―oncogene is associated with cellular
proliferation
and
that its inappropriate expression may be involved in carcinogenesis and in tumor progression. But its status as prognostic factor in cervical cancer is controversal. So we studied 42 women with normal cervix and 61 women with cervical carcinoma
to
investigate the relationship between the prognostic variables of the cervical cancer(age, stage, tumor size, depth of invasion, lymph node metastasis) and c―myc gene expression, analyzed using immunohistochemical staining with formalin fixed
paraffin
embedded tissues from Januarv 1985 to December 1986. And we assessed the prognostic significance of c―myc gene expression by multivariate analysis.
There was significant difference in c―myc gene expression between the normal cervix and the invasive cervical carcinoma(0% : 34.4%, p<0.001). And the c―myc gene expression was increased significantly according to clinical stage and depth of
invasion.
But no relationship was found between c―myc overexpression and other clinical and histologic parameters, such as age, primary tumor size and lymph node metastasis. The 5 year disease free survival retes of the patients whose tumors showed c―myc
overexpression were significantly lower(23.1%0 than that(50.0%) of other cancer patients. But only lymph node metastasis was significantly related to the relative risk of relapse when the multivariate analysis was performed.
These results suggested that c―myc gene expression may be associated with the cervical tumorigenesis, but not useful as an independent prognostic factor of the cervical carcinoma.
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