The Relationship Between Leptin Receptor Expression and Endometrial Carcinoma; A Case-Control Study

BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVE: Endometrial carcinoma is one of the most common malignancies in women in developed countries and the four(th) malignancy in Iranian women. Therefore, the identification of its causative factors is essential for the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. This study was aimed to compare the leptin receptor (Ob-R) expression in the endometrial carcinoma cases and non-carcinoma samples. METHODS: In this case-control study, 89 samples (including 45 carcinoma and 44 non-carcinoma samples) were examined. The carcinomatous samples were selected by the census method and others were selected with random method. The data were obtained from histopathologic diagnosis, immunohistochemistry (negative, positive and intensity of immunoreactivity), age, history of diabetes, and hypertension. Ob-R expression was compared in the studied groups using Chi-square, Fisher tests and Multivariate logistic regression analysis. In all tests the level of significance was set at 0.05. The SPSS 26 was used for data analysis. RESULTS: The frequency of high levels of leptin receptors in the patients with endometrial carcinoma was significantly higher compared to the control group (57.8% vs. 2.3%) (P<0.05). Adjusting the effects of age, history of diabetes mellitus (DM) and hypertension (HTN) revealed that the positive-receptor group had 37.75 (95% CI; 5.18-275.04) odds of having endometrial carcinoma (P<0.001). CONCLUSION: The leptin receptor may be a risk factor for the endometrial carcinoma among women tested in Kashan. Based on these results, leptin receptor might be considered as a potential biomarker for screening the endometrial carcinoma or targeting the therapeutic purposes.