Relationship between HSP90 protein expression and overall survival and clinicopathological outcomes in gastric cancer patients

Aim: Gastric cancer is a highly prevalent public health problem with high morbidity and mortality. Its primary treatment is surgery. Recently, studies involving biological parameters and genetics in gastric cancer have been emerging but with many blind spots. Our study aims to investigate the clinicopathological and prognostic significance of heat shock proteins (HSP90) expression in patients with resectable gastric cancer. Methods: Single-center retrospective clinical study conducted at the General Surgery Department of the local training and research hospital. Our study involves 54 patients who had curative surgery for gastric cancer between 2011 and 2014. Results: Pathological specimens fixed in formalin and paraffin were re-evaluated with HSP90 staining and expression of HSP90 was evaluated. It was found that only 39 (72.2%) patients showed HSP90 expression. Seventeen (31.5%) of those showed mild, 13 (24.1%) had moderate, and 9 (10.5%) severe expression. HSP90 expression did not have a significant effect on survival in patients who underwent curative resection for gastric cancer, although statistically close. The effect of expression and intensity on overall survival was not statistically significant either. Conclusions: There are various reports in literature on HSP90 expression in gastric cancer - some find it to be a prognostic factor, some not. There is a number of limitations of our study as we did not include metastatic tumors, the number of patients was low, the study involved only our patients and a single pathologist. This is the first study carried out in our population on this subject. Further studies could be done to evaluate this particular relationship in an effort to possibly identify novel treatments in gastric cancer.