Stomatin-like protein 2 expression is associated with clinical survival in patients with cervical cancer.

Aims: To investigate the prognostic role of stomatin-like protein 2 (STOML2) in cervical cancer.

Methods: The expression of STOML2 in 8 pairs of cervical cancer and adjacent normal cervical tissues were detected by Real-time PCR. Immunohistochemistry was performed to evaluation of STOML2 expression in 94 paraffin-embedded cervical cancer samples. The correlation between STOML2 expression and cervical cancer progression and prognosis was analyzed statistically.

Results: STOML2 expression was upregulated in cervical cancer tissues compared with adjacent normal cervical tissues. Of the 94 cervical cancer cases, high STOML2 expression was detected in 54 cases (57.4%). STOML2 expression was significantly related to tumor stage (P = 0.013) and tumor size (P = 0.025). Moreover, patients with high expression of STOML2 had a significant shorter overall survival and recurrent free survival time compared with those with low STOML2 expression in cervical cancer (P = 0.001 and P = 0.017, respectively). Multivariate analysis revealed that STOML2 was an independent prognostic factor (P = 0.022) for the overall survival in cervical cancer.

Conclusion: Our study showed STOML2 was correlated to progression in cervical cancer, and implicated it as a potential predictive factor for the prognosis of cervical cancer.