{"title":"Clinical significance and expression of ALDH1 in triple-negative breast cancer.","authors":"Yaoyao Yang, Zhuoran Li, Yangyang Zhu, Chongyong Guo, Li Yang, Jian Zhang","doi":"10.1186/s13000-025-01726-y","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><strong>Background: </strong>Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is aggressive and has limited therapeutic options due to the absence of targeted therapies, highlighting the urgent need for prognostic biomarkers linked to cancer stemness and chemoresistance. Aldehyde dehydrogenase 1 (ALDH1), a key regulator of stem cell properties, remains incompletely characterized in TNBC clinical cohorts.</p><p><strong>Methods: </strong>ALDH1 mRNA expression levels were analyzed using the GEO2R online database, and its prognostic significance was assessed via the Kaplan‒Meier plotter tool. Immunohistochemical (IHC) staining was performed on a tissue microarray comprising 96 TNBC samples and paired adjacent normal tissues from patients treated at Binzhou People's Hospital between 2016 and 2022. The associations between ALDH1 expression and clinicopathological parameters were evaluated using the chi-square test.</p><p><strong>Results: </strong>Bioinformatics analysis revealed significantly higher ALDH1 mRNA expression in TNBC tissues compared to adjacent benign tissues. Kaplan‒Meier survival analysis demonstrated that elevated ALDH1 mRNA expression was associated with poor prognosis in TNBC patients. IHC staining further confirmed elevated ALDH1 protein expression in TNBC tissues compared with normal adjacent tissues. However, there was no significant correlation between ALDH1 expression and conventional clinicopathological parameters, including age, menopausal status, tumor size, TNM stage, histological grade, histological subtype, axillary lymph node metastasis and the Ki-67 index (p > 0.05). High ALDH1 expression was significantly associated with poorer overall survival ( χ<sup>2</sup> = 16.836, p < 0.001).</p><p><strong>Conclusion: </strong>Our data demonstrate that ALDH1 expression is not significantly associated with conventional clinicopathological parameters (such as age, TNM stage, or histological grade). Instead, it is associated with poorer survival on univariate analysis in TNBC patients. Its lack of association with clinicopathological factors suggests its potential utility as a supplementary prognostic indicator.</p>","PeriodicalId":11237,"journal":{"name":"Diagnostic Pathology","volume":"20 1","pages":"117"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3000,"publicationDate":"2025-10-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12533427/pdf/","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Diagnostic Pathology","FirstCategoryId":"3","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1186/s13000-025-01726-y","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"PATHOLOGY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Background: Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is aggressive and has limited therapeutic options due to the absence of targeted therapies, highlighting the urgent need for prognostic biomarkers linked to cancer stemness and chemoresistance. Aldehyde dehydrogenase 1 (ALDH1), a key regulator of stem cell properties, remains incompletely characterized in TNBC clinical cohorts.
Methods: ALDH1 mRNA expression levels were analyzed using the GEO2R online database, and its prognostic significance was assessed via the Kaplan‒Meier plotter tool. Immunohistochemical (IHC) staining was performed on a tissue microarray comprising 96 TNBC samples and paired adjacent normal tissues from patients treated at Binzhou People's Hospital between 2016 and 2022. The associations between ALDH1 expression and clinicopathological parameters were evaluated using the chi-square test.
Results: Bioinformatics analysis revealed significantly higher ALDH1 mRNA expression in TNBC tissues compared to adjacent benign tissues. Kaplan‒Meier survival analysis demonstrated that elevated ALDH1 mRNA expression was associated with poor prognosis in TNBC patients. IHC staining further confirmed elevated ALDH1 protein expression in TNBC tissues compared with normal adjacent tissues. However, there was no significant correlation between ALDH1 expression and conventional clinicopathological parameters, including age, menopausal status, tumor size, TNM stage, histological grade, histological subtype, axillary lymph node metastasis and the Ki-67 index (p > 0.05). High ALDH1 expression was significantly associated with poorer overall survival ( χ2 = 16.836, p < 0.001).
Conclusion: Our data demonstrate that ALDH1 expression is not significantly associated with conventional clinicopathological parameters (such as age, TNM stage, or histological grade). Instead, it is associated with poorer survival on univariate analysis in TNBC patients. Its lack of association with clinicopathological factors suggests its potential utility as a supplementary prognostic indicator.
期刊介绍：
Diagnostic Pathology is an open access, peer-reviewed, online journal that considers research in surgical and clinical pathology, immunology, and biology, with a special focus on cutting-edge approaches in diagnostic pathology and tissue-based therapy. The journal covers all aspects of surgical pathology, including classic diagnostic pathology, prognosis-related diagnosis (tumor stages, prognosis markers, such as MIB-percentage, hormone receptors, etc.), and therapy-related findings. The journal also focuses on the technological aspects of pathology, including molecular biology techniques, morphometry aspects (stereology, DNA analysis, syntactic structure analysis), communication aspects (telecommunication, virtual microscopy, virtual pathology institutions, etc.), and electronic education and quality assurance (for example interactive publication, on-line references with automated updating, etc.).
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