Clinical Significance of T-Cadherin Tissue Expression in Patients with Bladder Transitional Cell Carcinoma

OBJECTIVE: To investigate the clinical significance of T-cadherin (T-cad) tissue expression in patients with bladder transitional cell carcinoma (TCC). MATERIALS AND METHODS: T-cad expression in 113 bladder TCC specimens and 37 normal controls were examined by immunohistochemical staining, and the results were correlated with clinicopathologic parameters. The χ(2) test, Kaplan-Meier survival analysis, log-rank test, and Cox proportional hazard model were used for statistical analysis. RESULTS: T-cad expression in bladder TCC samples was lower than in the controls. Decreased T-cad expression was correlated with advanced stage (p = 0.0027), high grade (p = 0.0078), large tumor size (p = 0.0262), and tumor relapse (p = 0.0293), but no association was found among T-cad expression and age (p = 0.1265), gender (p = 0.4236), tumor number (p = 0.0595) or tumor shape (p = 0.1779). Moreover, decreased T-cad expression was significantly associated with poor overall survival (p = 0.0168), even though it is not an independent prognostic marker (p = 0.2005). CONCLUSIONS: Decreased T-cad expression in tumor tissues is closely associated with malignancy in bladder TCC.