Prognostic significance of ferritin expression in colorectal adenocarcinoma

In recent years, there has been considerable interest in ferritin as an oncofetal protein. However, the clinical significance of ferritin expression in cancer tissues remains unknown. We performed an immunohistochemical study to examine the expression of ferritin in colorectal adenocarcinoma (n = 104). A total of 95 out of 104 (91.3%) colon cancers were positive for ferritin expression. The degree of immunoreactivity has no significant correlation with tumor grade (p = 0.964), size (p = 0.659), serosal invasion (p = 0.331), nodal metastasis (p = 0.955), distant metastasis (p = 0.354) and DNA ploidy status (p = 0.126), but there was a strong association between ferritin expression of tumor cells and stromal mononuclear cell infiltration (p = 0.004). In terms of prognostic significance, multivariate analysis showed that nodal metastasis (p = 0.0123) and distant metastasis (p = 0.0237) were independent poor prognostic factors. However, there was no significant difference in survival between patients with weak and strong ferritin expression in cancer tissues (p = 0.3766). The results indicate that the majority of colorectal adenocarcinomas exhibit ferritin expression. The grade of ferritin expression is strongly associated with stromal mononuclear cell infiltration, but has no significant correlation with any staging parameters or the survival of cancer patients.