Figure 1.
Expression of Flot-2 protein in NPC, atypical hyperplasia epithelial cells and control nasopharyngeal epithelial cells was detected by IHC.
The expression of Flot-2 protein was detected by immunohistochemistry using specific antibody as described in the section of materials and methods. Strong positive expression of Flot-2 protein was found in NPC cell membranes (Fig 1A, 20×, IHC, DAB staining). Weak Flot-2 membrane-staining was showed in the atypical hyperplasia epithelial cells (Fig 1B, 20×, IHC, DAB staining). Negative staining of Flot-2 was showed that in the control nasopharyngeal epithelial cells (Fig 1C, 20×, IHC, DAB staining). Negative control showed no Flot-2 staining in the NPC cells (Fig 1D, 20×, IHC, DAB staining).
Figure 2.
Expression of Flot-2 protein in NPC and atypical hyperplasia nasopharyngeal epithelia compared to the control nasopharyngeal mucosa epithelia.
Results showed that there were significant differences between the groups which were statistically evaluated by chi-square test.
Table 1.
Analysis of the association between expression of Flot-2 protein and clinicopathological features of NPC.
Figure 3.
Kaplan-Meier curve for overall survival of NPC patients with expression of Flot-2 and different clinicopathological characteristics.
Kaplan-Meier analysis to plot the overall survival curves of all 134 NPC patients with expression of Flot-2 and different clinicopathological characteristics and statistical significance was assessed using the long-rank test. Fig 3A Expression of Flot-2 protein in the NPC patients was no significantly related to their prognosis (P>0.05, two sided). Fig 3B NPC patients with lymph node metastasis were significantly related to poor prognosis compared to those patients without lymph node metastasis (P = 0.009, two sided). Fig 3C NPC patients with clinical stage III-IV were significantly related to poor prognosis compared to those patients with clinical stage I-II (P = 0.005, two sided).
Table 2.
Multivariate logistic regression analysis of lymph node metastasis factors in NPC patients.
Table 3.
Summary of statistical analysis of Flot-2 immunostaining for the detection of NPC patients with lymph node metastasis.