Overexpression of serum response factor is correlated with poor prognosis in patients with gastric cancer

Summary Serum response factor (SRF) is highly expressed in many tumors, including gastric cancer. However, the exact prognostic utility of SRF in patients with gastric cancer remains unclear. Therefore, in this study, we investigated the expression and prognostic value of SRF in patients with gastric cancer. SRF expression was detected by immunohistochemistry in 149 gastric cancer samples. The relationship between SRF expression and clinicopathological characteristics along with the prognostic significance of SRF in disease-free survival and overall survival of patients was analyzed. We found that the expression of SRF was significantly increased in gastric cancer tissues compared with adjacent noncancerous tissues. Overexpression of SRF was significantly correlated with histologic differentiation, invasion depth, lymph node metastasis, and TNM stage. Furthermore, disease-free survival rate and overall survival rate were both significantly lower for patients with high SRF expression. Multivariate Cox regression analysis identified high SRF expression as an independent prognostic factor for disease-free survival but not for overall survival. Our findings indicate that overexpression of SRF may play an important role in human gastric cancer recurrence and prognosis. SRF may serve as a predictive marker for prognosis of gastric cancer.