Background: Ovarian cancer is a gynecologic cancer with a high mortality rate. This shows the need of effective screening methods and reliable cancer markers for ovarian cancer staging and appropriate effective cancer treatment.
Methods: Expression of estrogen receptor alpha and beta was studied by immunhistochemical analysis of 100 ovarian cancer tissue samples.
Results: In this study on 100 serous ovarian cancer tissue samples from patients with defined clinicopathologic features, a significant association of ER-alpha expression with ovarian cancer grading (p = 0.004), progression-free survival (p = 0.007), and cause-specific survival (p = 0.001) was demonstrated. Expression of ER-beta was found to be associated with the metastatic lymph node status (p = 0.006).
Conclusion: Immunohistochemical analysis of ER might be used as an easy, simple and highly efficient marker to identify high-risk patients and may aid in the selection of patients for a more aggressive adjuvant therapy. Furthermore, patients that show a positive ER-alpha immunostaining can be selected for a specific anti-hormonal therapy, as already performed for breast cancer patients.