Abstract
Cytokeratin 18 (CK18), a type I cytokeratin of the intermediate filament family, has been associated with the prognosis of cancer patients for decades. However, its exact role in predicting the clinical outcome of breast cancer remains controversial. To comprehensively investigated the prognostic value of CK18 in breast cancer, a systematically meta-analysis was conducted to explore the association between CK18 expression and overall survival. Literature collection was conducted by retrieving electronic databases Pubmed, Cochrane Library, Web of Science, EMBASE, and OVID completely (up to January 1, 2017). Nine relevant studies with 4857 cases assessing the relationship between CK18 high expression and the outcome of breast cancer patients were enrolled in our analysis. The results indicated that the high level of CK18 expression was significantly associated with overall survival of breast cancer patients via a specimen-depended manner. Reports which used serum to detect the expression of CK18 predicted a poor outcome of breast cancer (HR = 1.24, 95%CI: 1.11–1.38, P<0.0001), while studies which used tissue as specimen indicated a reverse result (HR = 0.71, 95%CI: 0.60–0.84, P<0.00001). Moreover, overexpression of CK18 was highly relevant to advanced clinicopathological parameters of breast cancer, such as progesterone receptor, human epidermal growth factor receptor-2, tumor size, tumor stage, nodal status, and tumor grade. Taken together, the present study demonstrated that CK18 might be served as a novel biomarker to predict clinicopathological features and the outcome of breast cancer.
Highlights
Breast cancer is the most common neoplasm damaging women’s health worldwide, which accounts for 22.9% of invasive cancers and 18.2% of all cancer deaths in women [1]
Our results indicated that high expression of Cytokeratin 18 (CK18) was significantly related with positive expression of progesterone receptor (PR) and human epidermal growth factor receptor-2 (HER2), which could identify the metastatic progression of breast cancer
The present study indicated that overexpression of CK18 was highly correlated with advance clinicopathological parameters
Summary
Breast cancer is the most common neoplasm damaging women’s health worldwide, which accounts for 22.9% of invasive cancers and 18.2% of all cancer deaths in women [1]. Due to the intratumoral heterogeneity of breast cancer, in combination with the mutation and evolution during the metastatic process, resistance to the molecularly therapeutic agents still remains a challenge [5,6]. It is of great importance to develop more predictive markers to establish the optimum therapeutic strategy. The expression of cytokeratin proteins is largely determined by the epithelial cell differentiation, which could be regarded as a utility tool c 2018 The Author(s).
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