PURPOSE: Inflammation may play a role in the development and progression of many cancers, including prostate cancer.
We sought to test whether histological inflammation within prostate cancer was associated with more aggressive disease.
METHODS: The slides of prostatectomy specimens were reviewed by a board-certified pathologist on 287 men from a Veterans Affairs Medical Center treated with radical prostatectomy from 1992 to 2004. The area with the greatest tumor burden was scored in a blinded manner for the degree of inflammation: absent, mild, or marked. We used logistic and Cox proportional hazards regression analysis to examine whether categorically coded inflammation score was associated with adverse pathology and biochemical progression, respectively.
RESULTS: No inflammation was found in 49 men (17 %), while 153 (53 %) and 85 (30 %) had mild and marked inflammation. During a median follow-up of 77 months, biochemical recurrence occurred among 126 (44 %) men. On multivariate analysis, more inflammation was associated with greater risk of positive margins, capsular penetration, and seminal vesicle invasion (all p < 0.05). Marked inflammation was associated with increased PSA recurrence risk when adjusting for preoperative features only (HR 2.08, 95 % CI 1.02-4.24), but not after adjusting for pathologic features.
CONCLUSIONS: Inflammation within prostate cancer was associated with more advanced disease, although it is unclear whether aggressive disease caused increased inflammation or inflammation caused aggressive disease.
Written by:
Klink JC, Bañez LL, Gerber L, Lark A, Vollmer RT, Freedland SJ. Are you the author?
Urology Section, Department of Surgery, Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Durham, NC, USA.
Reference: World J Urol. 2013 Apr 2. Epub ahead of print.
doi: 10.1007/s00345-013-1065-8
PubMed Abstract
PMID: 23546767
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