TY  - JOUR
A1  - Atmaca, Akin
A1  - Werner, Dominique
A1  - Pauligk, Claudia
A1  - Steinmetz, Kristina
A1  - Wirtz, Ralph
A1  - Altmannsberger, Hans-Michael
A1  - Jäger, Elke
A1  - Batran, Salah-Eddin al-
T1  - The prognostic impact of epidermal growth factor receptor in patients with metastatic gastric cancer
T2  - BMC cancer
N2  - Background: The epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) is a potential target of anticancer therapy in gastric cancer. However, its prognostic role in metastatic gastric or gastroesophageal junction (GE) cancer has not been established yet.
Methods: EGFR status was analyzed by immunohistochemistry (IHC) in paraffin-embedded samples from 357 patients who received chemotherapy in 4 first-line trials. Automated RNA extraction from paraffin and RT-quantitative PCR were additionally used to evaluate EGFR mRNA expression in 130 patients.
Results: EGFR protein expression (any grade) and overexpression (3+) were observed in 43% and 11% of patients, respectively. EGFR positivity correlated with intestinal type histology (p = 0.05), but not with other clinicopathologic characteristics. Median follow-up was 18.2 months. Median overall survival (OS) was similar in patients with EGFR positive vs. those with EGFR negative tumors, regardless whether positivity was defined as ≥1+ (10.6 vs. 10.9 months, p = 0.463) or as 3+ (8.6 vs. 10.8 months, p = 0.377). The multivariate analysis indicated that EGFR status is not an independent prognostic factor (hazard ratio 0.85, 0.56 to 1.12, p = 0.247). There were also no significant differences in overall survival when patients were categorized according to median (p = 0.116) or quartile (p  = 0.767) distribution of EGFR mRNA gene expression. Similar distributions of progression-free survival according to EGFR status were observed.
Conclusions: Unlike different cancer types where EGFR-positive disease is associated with an adverse prognostic value, EGFR positivity is not prognostic of patient outcome in metastatic gastric or GE cancer.
KW  - EGFR
KW  - Immunohistochemistry
KW  - Gastric cancer
KW  - Survival
KW  - Prognostic
Y1  - 2012
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/37289
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-372899
SN  - 1471-2407
N1  - Copyright ©2012 Atmaca et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
VL  - 12
IS  - 524
PB  - BioMed Central
CY  - London
ER  -