Infection of Epstein-Barr virus in colorectal cancer in Chinese.
Except for the tight correlation to nasopharyngeal carcinoma, accumulating evidences show that Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) is correlated to other carcinomas. This study was to investigate the correlation of EBV to colorectal carcinoma in Chinese. EBV DNA was detected by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) in 90 specimens of primary colorectal carcinoma and 25 specimens of corresponding adjacent non-cancerous tissue, with the primers covering 2 different regions of EBV genome, BamH I W fragment and latent membrane protein 1 (LMP1) exon 3. The expression of EBV nuclear antigen 1 (EBNA1) and LMP1 were determined by immunohistochemistry, and the expression of EBV-encoded RNAs (EBERs) was detected by in situ hybridization. EBV LMP1 exon 3 and W fragment were detected in 27.7% and 32.2% of the 90 colorectal carcinoma specimens, which were significantly higher than the positive rate of EBV gene in the 25 adjacent non-cancerous tissues (4.0%, P<0.001). Of the 29 W fragment-positive tumors, 23 (79.3%) were EBNA1-positive, 1 (3.4%) was EBERs-positive; most EBNA1-positive cells were tumor cells with positive signals gathered in the nuclei. No expression of EBNA1 and EBERs were detected in the 8 W fragment-negative tumors. No expression of LMP1 was detected in all tumor specimens. EBV infection might be associated with colorectal carcinoma in Chinese.
PubMed Abstracts
PubMed Abstracts