Objectives: The individual recurrence-free period after primary surgery of patients with Ta urothelial cell carcinoma (UCC) cannot be predicted accurately. This study aims at discriminating between patients with primary Ta UCC and long or short recurrence-free periods.
Methods: We investigated mRNA expression of 23 genes in 44 primary Ta tumours (23 and 21 tumours were from patients with long [>or=4 yr] or short [<or=2 yr] recurrence-free periods, respectively), using real-time quantitative polymerase chain reaction. The genes were selected from previously published studies and showed a relationship with tumour recurrence in patients with UCC.
Results: Differential mRNA expression between the two patient groups indicated statistical significance only for the gene survivin (p=0.0011). Its recurrence predictive value could not be increased by a combination with any of the other genes. Comparison of the receiver operating characteristic curves for survivin expression between patients with long or short recurrence-free intervals revealed an area under the curve of 0.79 (95%CI, 0.65-0.92). Using the median expression (0.84) as cut-off level, survivin identified 71.4% (95%CI, 47.8-88.7) and 69.6% (95%CI, 47.1-86.8) of the patients with long or short recurrence-free periods, respectively.
Conclusions: Our study identifies survivin as the most promising candidate to distinguish between patients with primary Ta UCC and long or short recurrence-free intervals. Therefore, survivin mRNA expression analysis might help the urologist to individualise patient treatment and prevent unnecessary cystoscopies in a subgroup of these patients.