Prognostic significance of stathmin expression in correlation with metastasis and clinicopathological characteristics in human ovarian carcinoma

Stathmin, also called oncoprotein 18, is a founding member of the family of microtubule-destabilizing proteins that play a critical role in the regulation of mitosis. Stathmin is non-expressed in normal tissues, but stathmin gene is expressed at high levels in many human malignancies and the relationships between the levels of this gene expression in tumors and prognosis of the patients have been addressed. In this report, we explored the relationships between stathmin mRNA expression in ovarian carcinoma tissues and clinicopathological parameters. We collected and analyzed paraffin wax-embedded ovarian tumor biopsy tissues from 42 ovarian cancer patients in our hospital. We employed RT-PCR method and performed a densitometric analysis to determine the ratio of stathmin relative to beta-actin as an internal marker. Results showed that the stathmin mRNA expression was detected in all the ovarian carcinoma tissue samples and those samples with metastasis had higher levels of stathmin mRNA expression in initial biopsy specimens (P<0.05). Moreover, the levels of stathmin mRNA expression between samples with and without metastasis showed a statistically significant difference (P<0.05).