In this study, the evaluation of E-cadherin expression in an OC tissue microarray revealed its prognostic value to discriminate between advanced- and early-stage tumors, as well as serous tumors from other histologies.
Decreased epithelial cadherin (E-cadherin) expression is hypothesized to be related to poor prognosis of ovarian cancer, but the predictive value is still inconsistent.
The prognostic role of epithelial cadherin (E-cadherin) downregulation in ovarian cancer has been assessed for years while the results remain inconclusive.
The findings showed that CDH1 promoter methylation had an increased risk of ovarian cancer in cancer tissues (OR = 8.71, P < 0.001) in comparison with nonmalignant tissues.
PITX2-induced TGF-β pathway regulated the expression of invasion-associated genes, SNAI1, CDH1 and MMP9 (p < 0.01) that accounted for enhanced motility/invasion of ovarian cancers.
In conclusion, Dysfunction of the cell cycle and/or the cell-cell adhesion molecule plays a role in the pathogenesis of ovarian cancer and that the analysis of the methylation of p15 and E-cadherin genes can provide clinically important evidence on which to base the treatment.
These findings suggest that the expression of epithelial-mesenchymal transition-related genes such as ZEB2 and CDH1 may play important roles in the invasion process of advanced stage serous ovarian cancer.
Promoter CpG hypermethylation may be an alternative to mutation(s) to inactivate tumour suppressor genes such as MGMT, CDH1, RAR-beta and SYK, and this can also be an early event in the pathogenesis of OCs.