Research Article Absence of Autophagy-Related Proteins Expression Is Associated with Poor Prognosis in

Copyright © 2014 Ji Hye Choi et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Background/Aim. Autophagy, a cellular degradation process, has paradoxical roles in tumorigenesis and the progression of human cancers. The aim of this study was to investigate the expression levels of autophagy-related proteins in colorectal cancer (CRC) and to evaluate their prognostic significance. Methods. This study is a retrospective review of immunohistochemical and clinico-pathological data. All specimens evaluated were obtained from 263 patients with colorectal cancer who had undergone surgery between November 1996 and August 2007. The primary outcomes measured were the expression levels of three autophagy-related proteins (ATG5, BECN1/Beclin 1, and Microtubule-associated protein 1 light chain 3B (LC3B)) by immunohistochemistry and its association in clinicopathological parameters and patient survival. Results. The autophagy-related protein expression frequencies were 65.1 % (151/232) for ATG5, 71.3 % (174/244) for BECN1, and 74.7 % (186/249) for LC3B for the 263 patients. Correlation between the expression of autophagy-related proteins was significant for all protein pairs. Multivariate analysis showed that negative LC3