HE4 Tissue Expression As A Putative Prognostic Marker in Low-Risk/Low-Grade Endometrioid Endometrial Cancer: A Review

Overview

Journal Curr Oncol

Publisher MDPI

Specialty Oncology

Date 2022 Nov 10

PMID 36354733

Authors

Valerio Mais

Maria Luisa Fais

Michele Peiretti

Daniela Fanni

Elena Massa

Giulia Carboni

Giuseppina Fais

Giuseppe Deo

Stefano Angioni

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Low-grade stage I endometrioid endometrial carcinomas should have an excellent prognosis, but a small subset of these cancers can relapse. The search for putative immunohistochemical prognostic markers for relapse in low-risk/low-grade endometrioid endometrial cancers remains open. Among the candidate molecules that may implicate the roles of immunohistochemical risk markers, we focused our attention on human epididymis protein 4 (HE4) after a review of the literature. Few authors have devoted themselves to this topic, and none have found a correlation between the tissue expression of HE4 and the molecular classification of endometrial cancer. Five different variants of HE4 mRNA and multiple protein isoforms of HE4 were identified many years ago, but current HE4 assays only measure the total HE4 expression and do not distinguish the different proteins encoded by different mRNA variants. It is important to have an approach to distinguish specific variants in the future.

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