Lekshmi Vijayakumaran Nair Lilly1 , Geetha Sukumaran2
BACKGROUND Gastric carcinoma is an important cause of cancer related mortality worldwide. Majority of the patients are diagnosed in the advanced stage of the disease. The main treatment modalities are surgery and chemotherapy, but the survival rate of patients with advanced resectable gastric cancer remains poor. For patients with unresectable gastric cancer, chemotherapy remains the treatment of choice. Into this scenario comes the importance of newer targeted therapeutic agents which improve survival rates with acceptable toxicity effects. HER2 is a growth factor implicated in disease initiation and progression, and its expression is associated with a poor prognosis. The aim of this study is detection of HER2 expression in gastric carcinoma and evaluate its relationship with the histopathological characteristics. This would be the stepping stone for patients with tumours that are HER2 positive who could benefit from targeted therapeutical agents like Trastuzumab. METHODS Gastrectomy specimens which were diagnosed as Gastric Carcinoma in the Department of Pathology, Government Medical College, Trivandrum, during a period of two years were included in this study. Routine Haematoxylin and Eosin staining and immunohistochemistry for HER2 were done. RESULTS Thirty eight cases of gastric carcinoma were received during the study period. Intestinal type adenocarcinoma formed the bulk of the tumours (68.42 %), followed by the diffuse type adenocarcinoma (18.42 %). Of the 38 cases, 10 cases showed HER2 positivity. All the positive cases were intestinal type of adenocarcinomas. CONCLUSIONS Our study concluded that 26 % of gastric carcinomas showed positive immunoreaction for HER2 and HER2 overexpression was more in intestinal type adenocarcinomas. HER2 overexpression was also associated with higher stage tumours. There was no association with the patient’s age, gender, location of tumour and tumour differentiation.
