Neurofibromatosis type-1 is a prognostic indicator in human gastric carcinoma

// Debao Liu 1, 2, * , Yueying Zhang 3, * , Yan Li 4 and Kaixi Fan 1 1 Department of Oncology, Affiliated Hospital of Shandong Academy of Medical Sciences, Jinan, Shandong, China 2 School of Medicine and Life Sciences, University of Jinan-Shandong Academy of Medical Sciences, Jinan, Shandong, China 3 Department of Pathology and Pathophysiology, Institute of Basic Medicine, Shandong Academy of Medical Sciences, Jinan, Shandong, China 4 Department of Central Laboratory, Affiliated Hospital of Shandong Academy of Medical Sciences, Jinan, Shandong, China * These authors have contributed equally to this work Correspondence to: Kaixi Fan, email: fankaixiyx@sina.com Keywords: gastric cancer, neurofibromatosis type I, TNM stage, immunohistochemistry, prognosis Received: December 02, 2016     Accepted: July 06, 2017     Published: August 03, 2017 ABSTRACT We investigated whether the Neurofibromatosis type-1 ( NF1 ) gene was of prognostic relevance to gastric cancer (GC) patients. Immunohistochemical staining of 160 matched GC tumor and adjacent normal tissue samples showed that 58.1% (93/160) of GC samples were NF1-positive as compared to 94.4% (151/160) of normal tissue samples (χ 2 =58.05, P 0.05). Kaplan-Meier analysis revealed that negative or low NF1 were associated with poor overall survival (OS) in gastric cancer patients ( P <0.001). Further univariate and multivariate cox regression analysis also showed that NF1 expression was an independent risk factor of survival of GC patients. These data show that NF1 has prognostic relevance to clinical outcomes in gastric cancer patients.