CORRELATION BETWEEN THE EXPRESSION LEVEL OF ANDROGEN RECEPTOR IN BLADDER CANCER AND CLINICOPATHOLOGICAL FEATURES AND PROGNOSIS

Shaohua Zeng^{1, 2}, Xiaowei Wu², Qiuyan Zhou², Tiejun Pan^{1, 3, *}

¹The First School of Clinical Medicine, Southern Medical University, Guangzhou, PR China - ²Departments of Urology Surgery, The Sixth Affliated Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University, Qingyuan, PR China - ³Departments of Urology Surgery, General Hospital of Central Theater Command, WuHan, PR China

Objective: To study the correlation between the expression level of androgen receptor (AR) in bladder cancer and clinicopathological features and prognosis.

Methods: 127 cases of bladder cancer tissues used in this study were derived from the surgical specimens of our hospital from February 2013 to January 2014. Another 45 normal bladder mucosa were taken. Immunohistochemical staining of bladder cancer and normal bladder mucosa was performed to detect the expression of AR in the two tissues and to reveal the relationship between AR expression level and clinical-pathological parameters and patient survival.

Results: The positive expression rate of AR in bladder cancer tissues was 46.46% (59/127), which was significantly higher than that in normal bladder cancer tissues, which was 6.67% (3/45) (P<0.05). The expression of AR was correlated with pathological grade and lymph node metastasis of bladder cancer patients (P<0.05) but was not associated with age, gender and clinical stage (P>0.05). The 5-year survival rate of AR-positive patients was 77.97% (46/59), and for AR-negative patients was 89.71% (61/68). The difference between the two groups was not statistically significant (P>0.05). Both AR expression and lymph node metastasis can independently affect bladder cancer patients.

Conclusion: AR is positively expressed in bladder cancer, and its expression level is related to pathological grade and lymph node metastasis of patients, which indicates that it is involved in the progress of bladder cancer.