ABSTRACT

Purpose

Materials and Methods

A total of 188 cases of RCC were stained immunohistochemically for the expression of estrogen (ER), progesterone (PR) and androgen (AR) receptors using a tissue microarray technique. Nuclear steroid hormone receptor immunoreactivities were analyzed semiquantitatively with respect to associations with histological subtype, pT stage, grading and gender using Fisher's exact test. Impact on disease-free survival was analyzed using the Kaplan-Meier method.

Results

Sufficient tumor tissue was present in 182 of the 188 RCCs. AR expression was found in 27 of 182 tumors (14.8%) in 24 male and 3 female patients. AR expression was significantly associated with stage pT1 compared with pT3 (p <0.0001), and grades 1 and 2 compared with grade 3 (p = 0.0005). Regarding progression-free survival, AR positive RCCs showed a significantly better prognosis than AR negative cases (log rank test, p = 0.027). No difference of AR immunoreactivity could be detected between histological subtypes. Only 2 of the 182 cases (1.1%) showed ER and PR immunoreactivity in less than 10% of tumor cell nuclei.

Conclusions

While ER and PR expression was the exception, AR expression was found in almost 15% of the tumors and it was significantly associated with low stage, well or moderately differentiated tumors and a favorable outcome, decreasing with tumor growth and dedifferentiation. However, these results do not support a potential role of hormonal therapy for metastatic RCC.