Dermatologic surgeryTumor programmed cell death ligand 1 expression correlates with nodal metastasis in patients with cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck
Section snippets
Patients and procedures
The Department of Pathology electronic database at Hospital Universitario Central de Asturias was searched to locate all the patients who had developed nodal metastases from cSCC of the head and neck (cSCCHN) during 1998-2008. Two of the authors (Drs García-Pedrero and Munguia-Calzada) read the reports identified by this search. All the electronic medical records were reviewed (by Drs García-Pedrero and Munguía-Calzada), and information regarding clinical variables, date of nodal metastasis,
Results
In total, 100 white patients were enrolled in the study; 78 (78%) were men, and their mean age was 79 years (Table II). PD-L1 expression was observed in ≥1% of tumor cells in 41 (41%) patients (Table I). Tumor cell cytoplasmic membranes were positive for PD-L1 (Fig 1). Cytoplasmic PD-L1 staining of carcinoma cells was not considered.
Youden's index analysis indicated that the optimal cut-off to use to consider a patient positive for PD-L1 expression was ≥25% tumor cell positivity. A total of 13
Discussion
In this study, we assessed the role of tumor PD-L1 expression as a predictive factor for nodal metastases and survival in cSCCHN. Similar to previous studies,5, 7, 8, 9 we retrospectively analyzed PD-L1 expression in our cohort of cSCCHN patients.
PD-L1 is found mainly expressed on the surface of tumor cells and antigen-presenting cells of various solid malignancies, such as cSCCHN; melanoma; and carcinomas of the brain, thyroid, thymus, esophagus, lung, breast, gastrointestinal tract,
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2021, Journal of Cranio-Maxillofacial SurgeryCitation Excerpt :Slater et al. also worked with a Dako manual and showed correlation between PD-L1 expression in cSCC and tumor diameter, grading, the risk for metastasis, and tumor vertical thickness (Slater and Googe, 2016). The expression of PD-L1 in head and neck cSCC has been described as a prognostic-relevant marker, with increased expression associated with an increased risk for nodal metastasis (García-Pedrero et al., 2017). It is possible that PD-L1 expression in LSCC has no or less influence on outcome parameters in comparison with cSCC and oSCC, which could be a result of different tumor biology.
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Funding sources: Supported by grants from the Plan Nacional de I+D+I 2013-2016 ISCIII (CP13/00013 and PI13/00259 to Dr García-Pedrero), PI16/00280 and Centro de Investigación Biomédica en Red de Cáncer (CB16/12/00390) Spain, and the European Regional Development Fund.
Conflicts of interest: None declared.
Reprints not available from the authors.