Overexpression of Her-2/neu oncogene in 51 cases of endometrial carcinoma

Background: endometrial cancer is a common malignancy of the female genital tract. her-2 overexpression is strongly correlated with tumor grade, type, and stage and this association complicate the issue of response of her-2 positive endometrial carcinoma to chemotherapy. the aims of the current study are; to estimate the overexpression of her-2 in endometrial carcinoma in our patients, to correlate the results with other known clinicopathologic markers and to compare our results with others. material and methods: this is a cross-sectional retrospective study of 51 cases of endometrial carcinoma collected with their clinical data from al-batool teaching hospital and al-khansa’a maternity teaching hospital in mosul-iraq from january 2007 to january 2010. all cases were revised histologically. forty-three cases were total abdominal hysterectomy and 8 were curetting material. tumors were classified into two main types, endometroid and non-endometroid carcinomas. immunoperoxidase stains for her-2/neu were performed on representative formalin-fixed paraffin embedded blocks. results: majority of the endometrial carcinoma were in the 6th decade (50.9%) with a mean of 56.5 year. her-2/ neu overexpression was observed in 58.8% of cases. the most frequent association was with non-endometroid carcinoma (100%). expression of her-2/neu increased with increasing grade reaching 89.47% in grade iii tumors. the highest expression was detected in tumors invading deep into the myometrium (77.77%). conclusion: her-2/neu appears to play an important role in the biologic behavior of endometrial cancers. it was overexpressed in non-endometroid carcinoma, especially papillary-serous type, high grade tumors, and among the higher stages. therefore, targeted therapies directed against her-2, could be effective in some patients with endometrial cancer.