GATA3 Expression Is a Poor Prognostic Factor in Soft Tissue Sarcomas

OBJECTIVE: Recent studies have investigated the significance of GATA3 expression in patients with various malignant tumors. However, no previous studies have evaluated the clinicopathological importance of GATA3 expression in soft tissue sarcomas (STS) patients. METHODS: We evaluated GATA3 expression in 76 STS cases using immunohistochemical analysis, and statistically compared clinicopathological characteristics between GATA3-positive and GATA3-negative cases. RESULT: GATA3-positive expression was significantly associated with a higher mitotic count (P < 0.0001). Disease-free survival (DFS) of GATA3-positive cases was significantly shorter than that of cases without GATA3 expression (P = 0.0104). Overall survival (OS) of GATA3-positive cases was significantly shorter than that of cases without GATA3 expression (P = 0.0006). GATA3-positive expression was significantly associated with shorter DFS in both univariate analysis (hazard ratio [HR], 2.719; P = 0.012) and multivariate analysis (HR, 2.711; P = 0.014). GATA3-positive expression was also significantly associated with worse OS in both univariate analysis (HR, 5.730; P = 0.0007) and multivariate analysis (HR, 5.789; P = 0.0008). CONCLUSION: These results indicate that GATA3 is an independent prognostic factor and suggest that evaluation of GATA3 expression might enable more effective clinical follow-up using prognostic stratification of STS patients.