Vascular endothelial growth factor gene expression and polymorphism C936T in Iraqi patients with ovarian carcinoma

Abstract

The present study aimed to shed light on the association between the angiogenic factor VEGF gene expression and its genetic polymorphism VEGF C936T in the angiogenesis of ovarian cancer. A total of 44 Paraffin-embedded tissue blocks from patients with different stages of newly diagnosed ovarian cancer were provided by certain Iraqi hospitals as well as 14 samples of patients with benign ovarian tumors tissues as a control group were used in this study. The results detected that VEGF mRNA  in ovarian cancer samples was statistically significant compared to benign tumors(p value=0.039<0.05). The samples were divided into high and low mRNA-expression depending on the mean value of VEGF gene expression in benign tumors which used as a cutoff, the results showed that high statistical significant differences (P value = 0.0023<0.01) between high mRNA-expressing samples 30(76.9%), and low mRNA-expressing samples 9(23.07%). Statistical no significant differences were detected in compare with other histopathology tumor types. In correlation with stages, statistically significant difference was found between 31 (79.4%) of samples with stage I which showed the highest level of expression(P=0.0210<0.05). The result of  VEGF C936T polymorphism showed that out of 42 ovarian cancer  patients 24(57.14%) were homozygous for the C/C genotype, 11(26.2%) were heterozygous C/T and 7(16.66%) were homozygous T/T. High  significant prevalence of the VEGF 936C allele was detected in both ovarian cancer patients (P value 0.0019 <0.01) and benign ovarian tumors (P value 0.0026 <0.01) as compared with VEGF 936T allele. The study showed that the  average of  VEGF gene expression in ovarian cancer patients carrying the +936CT+TT genotypes (1.815116, 2.298769) was significantly lower than that in ovarian cancer patients with the VEGF+936CC genotype (4.395884). Same results were obtained from patients with benign ovarian tumors. In conclusion the present study investigated that the presence of the VEGF+936 T allele is associated with a decreased risk of ovarian cancer since the C936T polymorphism has been reported to be associated with lower VEGF plasma levels.