Original Article

Expression of vascular endothelial growth factors (VEGF) in head and neck squamous cell carcinoma and adjacent normal tissue

Devendra Kumar Ravi, Vinay Kumar, Mohan Kumar, Gajendra Singh, Shyam Bahadur Rai, A K Saxena and Manoj Pandey
World Journal of Pathology 2012, 1:17

Abstract

The prognosis in the head and neck squamous cell carcinoma depends upon the lymphnode status, margin and distant metastasis. Tumor recurrence has been seen inspite of negative margin reported by the pathologist. This has led to the hypothesis that cells have transformed themselves genetically at the molecular level and escape the recognition of the microscopic eye and later phenotypically express as cancer during follow-up.

Angiogenesis is essential for tumor growth and metastasis. Therefore, vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) expression increases chances for local relapse, lymph node recurrence and distant metastasis. In this study we have investigated the expression of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) in tumor tissue and adjacent normal tissue and correlated their expression with lymph node metastasis.

Out of 101 patients, 86 (85.1%) patients showed positive expression of VEGF in the tumour tissue. Of these 86, 67 patients showed positive expression for VEGF in the adjacent normal tissue (chi-square = 8.730, p value = 0.0003 with contingency coefficient 0.204). Of the 101 patients, 77 (76.2%) patients were found positive for the cervical lymphnodes. The Pearson correlation coefficient (r) was 0.203 with p value = 0.004 with confidence interval of r = 0.0086-0.3839.

Thus increased expression of VEGF in adjacent normal tissue in the head and squamous cell carcinoma might be the cause of the tumor recurrence or a second primary disease during follow-up and can used as target for the adjuvant therapy in such patients.

Key words

vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), surgical margin, local recurrence, head and neck cancer.

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