Cytoplasmic CCR7 (CCR7c) Immunoexpression Is Associated with Tumor Invasion in Gastric Cancer

This study investigates the CCR7 chemokine receptor's prognostic value in gastric cancer and its relationship to metastasis. Normal and adjacent tumor cells in 70 patients with gastric cancer were evaluated for CCR7 expression using immunohistochemical staining. The prognostic values of high and low levels of expression of CCR7 were also evaluated by multivariate and univariate analyses. Analysis indicated high expression of CCR7 in 52.9% of tumor tissue. Moreover, high expression of CCR7 was significantly related to metastasis of lymph nodes (p = 0.00). In addition, high expression of CCR7 had a positive correlation to the disease stage (p = 0.00), age of ≥50 years (p = 0.019), male gender (p = 0.024), vascular involvement (p = 0.009), histology of tumor adenocarcinoma (p = 0.00), and poor tumor differentiation (p = 0.00). However, the high expression of the CCR7 marker was not related to the tumor size. Based on our results, CCR7 expression in gastric cancer can be considered a clinical prognostic indicator in patients with gastric cancer.