L1CAM-positive expression is associated with poorer survival outcomes in resected non-small cell lung cancer patients.

Studies have found that L1CAM is significantly related to poor survival prognosis of many human cancers, but few studies focused on the prognostic value of L1CAM in lung cancer patients. Therefore, we detected L1CAM protein expression by immunohistochemistry and analyzed associations with survival outcomes of resected non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients. Overall, a number of 129 patients were enrolled in our study. Totally, 45 (34.9%) out of 129 NSCLC patients had L1CAM-positive expression. L1CAM-positive NSCLC patients had poorer 5-year survival than patients with L1CAM-negative expression by univariate analysis (P=0.05). The same trend manifested among the lung ADC patient set (P<0.05) other than lung SCC (P=0.42). Likewise, univariate analysis showed that L1CAM-positive expression significantly associated with poorer PFS for NSCLC, ADC, and SCC patients (all P<0.05). Multivariate analyses suggested that L1CAM was a predictive factor for patients' PFS, independent of patients' clinical features and treatments (P<0.05). However, we failed to observe significant results for NSCLC patients' OS (P=0.176). Summarized, L1CAM-positive expression associated with poorer survival outcomes, but to elucidate whether L1CAM is an independent predictive factor of poor OS for NSCLC patients, more studies are needed. IJCEP