VEGF Mediates Tumor Growth and Metastasis by Affecting the Expression of E-Cadherin and N-Cadherin Promoting Epithelial to Mesenchymal Transition in Gastric Cancer.

Background: Gastric cancer (GC) is the fifth leading cancer in the world, and there is a high mortality rate in China. Exploring the relationship between the prognosis of GC and the expression of related genes is helpful to further understand the common characteristics of the occurrence and development of GC and provide a new method for the identification of early GC, so as to provide the best therapeutic targets.

Methods: Vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) and markers of epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) were investigated immunohistochemically using tumor samples obtained from 196 GC tissues and adjacent tumor tissues. The correlation of the expression level with histopathologic features and survival was investigated.

Results: Here, we show that VEGF and EMT markers expression were significantly correlated with depth of tumor invasion and GC stage ( < .05), degree of differentiation and lymph node metastasis ( < .001). We found that the rate of VEGF positivity in GC tissues was 52.05%, which was significantly higher than that in adjacent cancer tissues (16.84%). In GC, the association between VEGF and E-cadherin was negative ( = -0.188,  < .05), whereas VEGF and N-cadherin were positively correlated ( = 0.214,  < .05). Furthermore, the Kaplan-Meier analysis and a Cox regression model were used to analyze the effect of VEGF and EMT marker expression on the survival of the patients. We found that the overall survival of GC patients was correlated with VEGF ( < .001), N-cadherin ( < .001), E-cadherin ( = .002) expression, and some histopathologic features.

Conclusions: Vascular endothelial growth factor and EMT markers exist side by side and play a part together in the development of GC, which provides new ideas for evaluating the prognosis of GC and researching targeted drugs.