Quantification of tumour and circulating vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) in patients with oesophagogastric cancer: a long-term follow-up study

Vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) is an angiogenic cytokine that regulates tumour angiogenesis. The prognostic significance of VEGF expression remains incompletely investigated for patients with oesophagogastric cancer. This study assesses the significance of tumour VEGF (T-VEGF) and circulating VEGF (C-VEGF) expression in a 10-year follow-up of patients with oesophagogastric cancer. Patients undergoing surgical resection were prospectively recruited between February 1999 and August 2000. Circulating VEGF, derived both from plasma (P-VEGF) and serum (S-VEGF), and T-VEGF were assessed using a commercial enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). As platelet count may contribute to C-VEGF, pre-operative platelet levels were also recorded to exclude a confounding effect. Patients were followed up over a 10-year period using the Northern Ireland Cancer Registry. Sixty-one patients were recruited (men=45) with a mean age of 65.7 years. The 10-year survival was 19.7% (n=12) with a median follow-up of 808 days (inter-quartile range [IQR]: 349.5-2358.5). Union for International Cancer Control (UICC) tumour staging was Stage I=9 (14.8%), Stage II=15 (24.6%), Stage III=33 (54.1%) and Stage IV=4 (6.6%). The only significant relationship between clinicopathological features and the study variables was for S-VEGF, which was elevated in patients with advanced T-stage (P = 0.05). Circulating VEGF did not correlate with platelet count. Although a trend towards decreased survival was observed for patients who had positive lymph nodes (P = 0.08) and advanced UICC stage (P = 0.09) on univariate analysis, only lymphovascular invasion significantly predicted poor prognosis in this cohort (P = 0.05). Therefore, ELISA quantification of circulatory or tumour VEGF does not appear to be a significant predictor of mortality in patients with oesophagogastric cancer.