EXPRESSION OF MMP-9 AS A PROGNOSTIC FACTOR OF UTERINE SARCOMA
Authors: Sukhin V.S. , Danyliuk S.V. , Sukhina О.М. , Sadniprjaniy O.V. , Lindquist D. , Hermelin H. , Tarján M. 
Published: August 2018

Uterine sarcoma is a highly aggressive mesenchymal neoplasm with an extremely unfavorable prognosis. Up today there are still relevant issues concerning search for clinical-morphological and biomolecular criteria for prognosis relapse-free survival of uterine sarcoma patients. It is well-known, the increase of the expression level of MMP-9 in primary tumor or metastatic foci correlates with a low differentiation of tumor cells, high ability for invasiveness, high metastatic activity, and shortened life expectancy. It’s still unknown, whether it is possible to consider the expression of MMP-9 in uterine sarcoma cells as a convincing prognostic factor. For many types of epithelial malignant neoplasms, high metastatic rate is associated with an increase level of MMP-9 both in plasma and in tumor tissue. The purpose of this study is to investigate the features of MMP-9 expression in uterine sarcoma cells for development of the model for individual prediction of the disease course. The study of the surgical material of selected 54 cases of uterine sarcoma of stage I-II (according to FIGO criteria) with a known prognosis of the disease, which were distributed depending on the morphological type done: leiomyosarcoma (LMS) – 18 cases, endometrial stromal sarcoma (ESS) - 22 cases, undifferentiated sarcoma (US) – 14 (according to the classification of tumors of the uterus of the WHO). For histological examination, pieces of tissue were cut from different parts of the tumor nodes – central, peripheral, parts of the adjacent intact tissue of myometrium (total of 6-8 bits). The tumor cell phenotype was determined using low molecular weight cytokeratins (Cytokeratin PAN, AE1 / AE3), smooth muscle actin (Smooth Muscle Actin, 1A4), myogenin (Myogenin (F5D)), CD 10 and vimentin (Vimentin, V9). The histochemical label was evaluated in two parameters: the degree of prevalence and intensity of coloration. To assess the color intensity, a qualitative scale was used: 0 – no reaction, 1+ – weak cytoplasmic coloration to 30.0% of tumor cells, 2+ – moderate reaction, 30.0 to 60.0% of stained cells, 3+ – pronounced cytoplasmic reaction in 60,0-100,0% of tumor cells. Statistical processing of the data was performed using the “STATISTICA 10.0” program package. The conducted study has showed, the negative (0) and weak (1+) expression of matrix metalloproteinase-9 were observed in the most part of ESS and only partially in US. Despite the stage of the disease, with such a status of MMP-9, there was observed no signs of relapsed disease. The moderate (2+) and high (3+) expression of MMP-9 was detected in 44.5 % of uterine sarcoma, in the most part in LMS patients. However, if in LMS cases the progressive disease was observed only in one third of them (4 of 12 cases), in case of ESS and US, in all the patients with such tumors status there was observed relapsed disease. Such a reaction may be indicative for invasive and metastatic potential of ESS and US and cause of the hematogenous metastases.