High EGFL6 expression is associated with clinicopathological characteristics in colorectal cancer

To explore the expression levels of EGFL6 in colorectal cancer and the association between EGFL6 and its clinicopathological parameters in patients. Immunohistochemistry assay was used to detect the expression levels of EGFL6 in cancer tissues of 42 colorectal cancer cases and corresponding adjacent normal tissues. The associations between protein expression levels of EGFL6 and the clinicopathological features, such as age, gender, smoking status, drinking status, TNM stage, Tumor T status, lymph node status, distant metastasis, and tumor diameter were also analyzed. We measured the plasma EGFL6 levels of colorectal cancer patients by using a commercial enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. The positive rate of EGFL6 in cancer tissues was significantly higher than that of cancer-adjacent tissues (P < 0.05). Correlation was found between the protein expression of EGFL6 and the TNM stage (P < 0.05), the tumor T status (P < 0.05), distant metastasis (P < 0.05) and tumor diameter (P < 0.05). The plasma EGFL6 levels were significantly higher in patients with colorectal cancer than in healthy controls (P < 0.001). Moreover, plasma EGFL6 levels were significantly higher in the patients with higher TNM stage (P = 0.024), tumor T status (P = 0.021), distant metastasis (P < 0.001), and tumor diameter (P = 0.049). Therefore, these results demonstrated that EGFL6 expression was correlated with the genesis and development of colorectal cancer.