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Objective To study the correlation among transcriptional expression and promoter methylation of FOXC 1 gene in epithelial ovarian tumors and its clinical characteristics. Methods Methylation-specific PCR was used to detect the methylation of FOXC1 gene promoter CpG island in 65 patients who underwent operation for epithelial ovarian tumors, reverse transcription PCR was performed to detect the expression of FOXC 1 mRNA. Result FOXC1 mRNA was showed in all epithelial ovarian tumor samples. The relative level of FOXC1 mRNA was 1.19 ±0.17 in benign tumors, 0.61 ±0.18 in borderline tumors and 0.38 ±0.16 in malignant tumors respectively. It was significantly lower in ovarian cancer than that in benign tumor specimens, and was significantly lower in borderline tumor than that in benign tumor too (P<0.05). The expression of FOXC1 was not correlated with clinical characteristics, such as clinical stage , histological differentiation. However there were lower expression level of FOXC 1 mRNA in patients with lymph node metastasis than that of patients without lymph node metastasis. The methylation rate of the FOXC1 gene promoter CpG island in ovarian cancer was higher than those in borderline tumor and the benign tumor, P<0.05. Conclution The expression of FOXC1 is closely correlated with the oncogenesis and progress of ovarian cancer. Promoter methylation may contribute to the low level of mRNA expression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]