Human Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor Expression in Colorectal Cancer and Its Relationship with Clinicopathological Characteristics

BACKGROUND: Some recent studies reported human epidermal growth factor receptor (HER-2/neu) as a marker that can be used in immunological studies of colorectal carcinoma for predicting the prognosis and the treatment. Therefore, we aimed to investigate the frequency of HER-2 expression in patients with colorectal cancer, and explore the relationship between clinicopathological prognostic factors and its expression based on immunohistochemical analysis. METHODS: This study included 50 patients with a histologically proven diagnosis of colorectal carcinoma who received surgery at Imam Khomeini Hospital affiliated to Mazandaran University of Medical Sciences. First, HER-2/neu protein expressions were detected by immunohistochemistry and then the data extracted from recorded files. RESULTS: The median age of the patients was 60.2±13.9 years (range: 25-93 years). There was no significant relationship between size of tumor, age, sex, lymph node metastases, distant metastasis, differentiation, and stage of the disease with positive expression of HER-2 in this study. CONCLUSION: No significant relationship between expression of HER-2 and clinicopathological prognostic factors was found in our study. Further comprehensive and prospective trial with standard method to evaluate the role of HER-2 expression among patients with colorectal cancer is needed.