Correlation between CXCR5 expression and prognosis in stage T1 non-small cell lung cancer

Abstract Background: Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related death. Even if early detection has been applied and proved to be effective, the survival outcomes are still poor. Thus, to find out novel prognostic factors is of great significance to identify high-risk patients and guide individualized precise treatment in order to reduce recurrence and improve survival outcomes.Methods: Tissue samples and clinicopathologic data of 244 stage T1 NSCLC patients were collected. We investigated CXCR5 expression using immunochemical method and analyzed its correlation with pathologic subtypes and prognosis.Results: Elevated level of positive CXCR5 expression was found in tumor tissues (p<0.0001) and patients with positive CXCR5 expression are more likely to have LVIs (p=0.030) and recurrences (p<0.043). Besides, CXCR5 expression is also correlated to histological type and differentiation. Lepidic predominant tumors have significantly lower expression of CXCR5 (p<0.001). Survival analyses showed that patients with positive CXCR5 had a significantly lower DFS (p=0.038) and patients with solid or micropapillary predominant NSCLC had a significantly worse prognosis. CXCR5 expression was proved to be an independent prognostic factor for DFS through multivariate analysis.Conclusions: CXCR5 expression has been proved to be an independent prognostic factor for stage T1 NSCLC patients. In addition, CXCR5 was also found to be relevant to cancer recurrence, and this indicated that CXCR5 may play an important role in lymph node and distant metastasis.