No difference in the occurrence of mismatch repair defects and APC and CTNNB1 genes mutation in a multi-racial colorectal carcinoma patient cohort

BACKGROUND AND AIMS: Colorectal cancers of different subtypes involve different pathogenic pathways like the Wnt and the mutator pathways. In this study, we screened 73 colorectal cancer cases from a multi-racial group for genetic and expression profile defects with the aim of correlating these with patients' clinicopathological characteristics.
METHODS: Mutation screening of the entire coding region of APC and exon 3 of CTNNB1, loss of heterozygosity (LOH) of APC, and microsatellite instability (MSI) status were assessed for 44 patients with available paired frozen normal and tumour tissues. In addition, 29 cases with available paraffin embedded tumour blocks were screened for mutation in exon 3 of CTNNB1, the APC mutation cluster region (codon 1286-1513), and hMLH1, hMSH2, hMSH6 protein expressions by immunohistochemistry method.
RESULTS: In our study, 15/73 cases showed APC mutations (20.5%), 1/73 cases had CTNNB1 mutation (1.4%), 5/32 cases had APC LOH (15.6%), and 16/70 (22.9%) cases revealed at least some form of mismatch repair (MMR) defect. Tumour grade (poor differentiation) was found to correlate significantly with right-sided tumour and mucinous histology (p = 0.01879 and 0.00320, respectively). Patients of younger age (below 45 years) more often had tumours of mucinous histology (p = 0.00014), while patients of older age (above 75 years) more often had tumours on the right side of the colon (p = 0.02448). Tumours of the mucinous histology subtype often had MMR defects (p = 0.02686). There was no difference in the occurrence of APC and CTNNB1 mutations and MMR defects found within our multi-racial colorectal cancer patient cohort.
CONCLUSION: Our findings support the notion that racial factor may not be related to the occurrence of MMR defects and APC and CTNNB1 mutations in our multi-racial patient cohort.