Overexpression of p53 in laryngeal carcinoma: clinicopathological implications

The aims of this study were to determine the incidence of p53 overexpression in squamous cell carcinoma of the larynx and to establish whether or not this bore any relationship to survival, location, stage, histological differentiation, nuclear atypia, mitotic activity, stromal desmoplasia, tumor-associated tissue eosinophilia, or stromal lymphoplasmocytic infiltration. Paraffin blocks from 51 cases of laryngeal squamous cell carcinoma with a minimum follow-up period of 36 months were recut and stained immunohistologically with anti-p53 antibody using the streptavidin-biotin technique. Results were compared with clinicopathological features with Kruskal-Wallis and Mann-Whitney tests. Sixty-three percent of tumors showed positive staining for p53, and in addition, 15% of the sections with adjacent normal or dysplastic mucosa showed positive staining. No relationship between p53 staining and prognosis or any other one of the aforementioned clinicopathological parameters was observed. Although p53 overexpression is a common feature in laryngeal carcinomas, it does not seem to have an impact on prognosis and it does not bear any relationship to the aforementioned clinicopathological parameters.