Correlation of Ki-67 cell proliferation marker expression with age, sex, disease stage, and tumor differentiation in gastric cancer

Abstract

Relevance: Gastric cancer continues to lead the cancer incidence structure. One of the directions of a comprehensive plan to reduce the incidence of malignant neoplasms is the development a highly efficient early diagnostics based on the relationship between the expression of the cell proliferation marker Ki-67 in gastric cancer with age, sex, stage of the disease and the degree of tumor differentiation according to immunohistochemical analysis.

The study aimed to study the relationship between the expression of the Ki-67 marker in gastric cancer and age, sex, stage of the disease, and the degree of tumor differentiation.

Methods: The research design is a comparative descriptive study. For the study, surgical material was used from 109 patients with gastric cancer stages 0-IIIC, obtained during gastric cancer operations from the pathology department of the West Kazakhstan Marat Ospanov Medical University (WKMOMU) Medical Center from 2021 to 2022. Histological and immunohistochemical studies were conducted at the morphological laboratory of the Department of Histology of WKMOMU. The obtained data was statistically processed.

Results: The present study showed a significant statistical correlation between the Ki-67 level and the histopathological grade of gastric cancer (p=0.039).

The indicators  such as ‘pTNM stage’ (p=0.894), ‘Age’ (p=0.664), ‘Sex (F – 1, M – 2)’ (p=0.928), and ‘Tumor localization (cardiac – 1, body – 2, antral and pyloric – 3)’ (p=0.866) did not statistically significantly correlated with the Ki-67 expression level.

Conclusion: The relationship between Ki-67 expression and histopathological grade (p=0.039) in gastric cancer helps identify patients with aggressive tumors that require adjuvant therapy.