A retrospective cohort study of clinical value of PRL-3 in stage III human colorectal cancer

The aim of this study was to investigate the expression of phosphatase of regenerating live-3 (PRL-3) in human stage III colorectal cancer (CRC) and to evaluate its correlation with metachronous liver metastasis (MLM) and prognosis. The retrospective cohort study included 116 stage III CRC primary tumors and 60 normal colorectal tissues. PRL-3 expression was measured by immunohistochemistry. We investigated the correlation of PRL-3 with clinicopathologic features by the chi-square test. The association of PRL-3 expression with MLM was assessed by binary logistic regression. Overall survival (OS) and disease-free survival (DFS) between patients with positive PRL-3 expression and those with negative PRL-3 expression were compared by the Kaplan–Meier method and Cox proportional hazards regression model. We found that 32.8% of stage III CRC primary tumors were PRL-3 positive, and 15.0% of normal colorectal epithelia showed high PRL-3 expression (P = .012). Seventeen tumors (47.2%) among 36 cases that developed MLM were PRL-3 positive, and only 21 tumors (26.3%) in the 80 cases that did not develop MLM had positive PRL-3 expression (P = .026). PRL-3 expression was associated with MLM (P = .028). Patients with positive expression of PRL-3 showed a significantly shorter OS (40.32 ± 3.97 vs 53.96 ± 2.77 months, P = .009) and DFS (34.97 ± 4.30 vs 44.48 ± 2.89 months, P = .036). A multivariate analysis indicated that PRL-3 expression was an independent unfavorable prognostic factor for OS (P = .007). Our study suggested that high PRL-3 expression is an independent risk factor for MLM and poor prognosis. PRL-3 is expected to be a promising biomarker for predicting the incidence of MLM and prognosis in patients with stage III CRC.