O papel da histona desacetilase 2 em carcinoma de células escamosas oral

Abstract

Evidence shows that epigenetic alterations, including histone modifications, play a decisive role in tumor development and progression, influencing the expression of oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes. Histone acetylation is one of the main epigenetic modifications, it is regulated by histone acetyltransferases (HATs) and histone deacetylases (HDACs), and directly affects chromatin structure and gene transcription. Oral squamous cell carcinoma (CCEO) is one of the main types of head and neck cancer and represents an important public health problem and epigenetic modifications are important events during its carcinogenesis and tumor progression. Therefore, the present study evaluated the immunohistochemical expression of histone deacetylase-2 (HDAC2) in 85 samples from patients with OSCC registered at the Laboratório de Patologia Bucal of the Universidade Federal de Uberlândia from 2006 to 2013, segregated in samples from patients without cervical lymph node metastases (PNM, n = 39) when compared to metastatic cases (PM, n = 46) compared with 17 samples of normal oral mucosa (MN), with tissue microarray technique. The results showed that the percentage of nuclear area marked by the enzyme was significantly higher in samples from patients PNM compared to PM. The ROC curve analysis demonstrated adequate discriminatory capacity between PNM and PM using this enzyme as a parameter, although there was no difference in the comparative analysis between CCEO and MN samples. In addition, higher HDAC2 expression was observed in early stages and in samples ≤ 4 cm. The results found in this study suggest that decreased HDAC2 expression may be an important event for the occurrence of metastasis in SCC and, thus, considered a potential prognostic biomarker.