Background
Lymph node metastasis is widely accepted as one of the most important determinants of prognosis in colorectal cancer (CRC)
patients. Therefore, there is an urgent need to identify molecular markers that can be used to predict lymph node metastasis.
Materials and Methods
Candidate genes were found using LMD and cDNA microarrays in a large-scale study of CRC, followed by Penalized Canonical Correlation
Analysis (PCCA). We focused on the Fanconi anemia, complementation group D2 (FANCD2) gene and evaluated FANCD2 mRNA expression in 133 CRC cases to determine the clinicopathological significance of FANCD2 expression.
Results
The mean level of FANCD2 mRNA expression in tumor tissue specimens was significantly higher than in nontumor tissue. FANCD2 expression was found to be a significant factor affecting lymph node metastasis: the high FANCD2 expression group had a significantly poorer prognosis than the low expression group.
Conclusions
This study suggests that PCCA can be used to identify genes related to clinicopathological features. Furthermore, high FANCD2 expression was a significant independent factor for lymph node metastasis.
Heita Ozawa and Masaaki Iwatsuki contributed equally to this study.