Clinicopathological evaluation of Sox10 expression in diffuse-type gastric adenocarcinoma

Sox10, one of the transcription factors, regulates Wnt/β-catenin signaling in diverse developmental processes in normal tissues. Sox10 is also expressed in variable solid tumors such as breast cancer, salivary tumor, hepatocellular carcinoma, ovarian tumor, nasopharyngeal carcinoma, prostate cancer, and digestive cancer. The role of Sox10 during tumorigenesis is still controversial, especially in digestive cancers; thus, we performed clinicopathological evaluation of Sox10 expression in 41 cases of diffuse-type gastric adenocarcinoma (DGA). We examined the expression of Sox10 by immunohistochemical staining and real-time quantitative reverse transcriptase PCR and evaluated the correlation between Sox10 expression and clinicopathological factors. A low-level expression of Sox10 was significantly associated with high-level venous invasion by immunohistochemical evaluation, while it was significantly associated with high-level lymphatic permeation when analyzed by real-time PCR assay. Survival analysis of 41 cases indicated that high level of vascular permeation was a statistically poor prognostic factor, suggesting that derogation of Sox10 would lead to unfavorable patients' outcome through the acceleration of vascular invasion. In this study, we revealed the clinical benefit of evaluation of Sox10 expression to predict the risk of vascular permeation which yields patients' poor prognosis in DGA.