Clinical significance of nm23 expression in resected pathologic-stage I, non-small cell lung cancer
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Updated: Oct 12, 2026
Ultra-Fast Amplicon-Based Next-Generation Sequencing in Non-Squamous Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer
Published on: September 8, 2023
Hiromichi Katakura1, Fumihiro Tanaka, Hiroki Oyanagi
1Department of Thoracic Surgery, Faculty of Medicine, Kyoto University, Japan.
Background:
Clinical significance of the status of nm23 gene, originally identified as an antimetastatic gene, in non-small cell lung cancer remains unestablished, whereas many clinical studies have demonstrated that reduced nm23 expression is correlated with tumor progression and poor prognosis in a variety of malignant tumors such as breast carcinoma.
Methods:
nm23 expression was examined immunohistochemically in a total of 117 patients with completely resected pathologic stage I non-small cell lung cancer.
Results:
nm23 expression was positive in 73 (62.4%) patients, and there was no correlation between nm23 expression and age, sex, performance status, pathologic T factor, histologic type, or degree of cancer cell differentiation. The 5-year survival rates of nm23-positive and nm23-negative patients were 79.7% and 57.8%, respectively, demonstrating a significantly poorer prognosis in nm23-negative patients (p = 0.013), which was confirmed by a multivariate analysis. nm23 was not correlated with the incidence of apoptosis, proliferative activity, or p53 status.
Conclusions:
nm23 expression was a significant factor for predicting a favorable prognosis, suggesting antimetastatic potential of the nm23 gene in non-small cell lung cancer.
