FASCIN EXPRESSION AT THE DEEP INVASIVE FRONT OF ORAL SQUAMOUS CELL CARCINOMA

BACKGROUND: Squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) is the most common malignancy of theoral cavity. Oral SCC is associated with a high potential of tumor recurrence and metastasis,leading to poor prognosis. Cell motility is an important factor in progression and metastasisof cancers. Recently, fascin has been linked to tumor progression by induced of cell motility.However, the precise roles of fascin in oral SCC have not been elucided clearly.THE PURPOSE: of this study was to evaluate the expression of fascin protein in deepinvasive front of oral SCC.METHOD: The expression of fascin at the deep invasive front of oral SCC was examined byimmunohistochemistry of 19 cases that were selected from Department of Pathology ,Dentistry School, Qazvin Medical University from 1998-2010. Histologic sections from thesepatients were prepared after grading H&E slides from formalin-fixed, paraffin embeddedtissues and were processed for histochemistry. Age of patients were 29-84 years (mean : 64 ),and the female-male ratio was 1.1:1 ( 10 women, 9 men ). The correlation between the fascinexpression and histologic grade of malignancy at the deep invasive front was analyzed usingFrequencies and chi-square test in SPSS software.RESULTS: 100% of patients overexpressed Fascin. For evaluating the distribution of Fascin,89.5% classified as 4 groups and 11.5% were classified as weakly immunoreactive, 48% asmoderate reactive and 26% as intensely reactive. There was no significant correlationbetween age, sex, location and invasive front histopathological grading with Fascinexpression. (p> 0.05)CONCLUSION: Overexpression of fascin at the deep invasive tumor front of SCC suggeststhat fascin protein expression initially induces morphological alterations with cell membraneprotrusions and enhances the motile properties of tumor cells to facilitate subsequentinvasion.

کلیدواژه ها:

Oral Squamous cell carcinoma ، Invasive front ، Fascin protein