Background
Currently, colorectal cancer (CRC) represents an important public health problem due to its high incidence and mortality. It is the third-most-common tumour type, and approximately one million new cases of CRC are diagnosed per year worldwide [
1]. The CRC survival rates are primarily determined by the stage of the tumour at diagnosis, as determined by the TNM (Tumour-Node-Metastases) classification system. At 5 years, 90% of patients with a localised tumour (a tumour that is confined to the intestinal wall) will be alive, whereas this percentage decreases to 60-70% if the tumour has spread to regional lymph nodes and is only approximately 5-10% for cases of CRC that involve metastatic disease. Moreover, approximately 40-50% of the patients that initially present with early stages of CRC will relapse. Despite recent improvements in CRC management, there remains a need to find biomarkers that provide prognostic information and guide therapy decisions.
Most CRCs progress through a multistep process that involves a series of genetic alterations; these alterations produce a phenotypic progression from normal tissue to adenoma to carcinoma. This tumourigenesis sequence is proposed by the Vogelstein model and accounts for approximately 85% of all CRCs [
2]. According to this model, adenomas of the colorectum are precursor lesions that may undergo malignant transformations and develop into adenocarcinomas over a period of months or years. This development involves three physiological phenomena: proliferation, differentiation and cell death. It has been demonstrated that an increase in proliferative activity occurs concurrently with the worsening of dysplasia during the adenoma-carcinoma transition. However, the role of apoptosis in this process has not yet been completely clarified.
Apoptosis may occur via two major interconnected pathways: the extrinsic or death receptor-mediated pathway, which is activated by the binding of specific ligands (such as FasL, TNF-α and TRAIL) to the receptors of cell surfaces; and the intrinsic or mitochondrial-mediated pathway, which is regulated through proteins of the Bcl-2 family and triggered either by the loss of growth factor signals or in response to genotoxic stress. Therefore the replication of cells with DNA damage is generally avoided because harmful genomic alterations typically induce the activation of apoptosis. It has been widely accepted that alterations in the physiologic response to DNA damage can facilitate the accumulation of oncogenic mutations; this accumulation may eventually lead to the development of neoplasia.
If the mechanisms that are necessary for maintaining the balance between proliferation and apoptosis function properly, then the homeostasis of the colonic epithelium in the intestinal crypt will be maintained. However, in this system, which involves a very high cell turnover rate, the down-regulation of apoptotic function would allow uncontrolled cell proliferation and tumour development. In fact, in several studies, a progressive inhibition of apoptosis during the mutation of cells from normal mucosa to CRC has been demonstrated [
3,
4]. However, other studies have suggested a trend towards increased apoptotic index (AI) during the process of CRC development [
5‐
8]. Therefore, further studies are needed to confirm this trend. In addition, given the emergent evidence indicating the relevance of apoptosis to the pathogenesis and progression of CRC, the potential prognostic implications of apoptotic rates have become increasingly intriguing. Nevertheless, there is a paucity of works demonstrating the prognostic significance of apoptosis in CRC, and only some researches have reported statistically significant worse outcomes for patients with higher AIs [
9,
10]. In this study, we investigated whether differences in apoptotic rates could be related to carcinogenesis and to the survival of CRC, and we report the first evidence that high AI is associated with a significant decrease not only in overall survival (OS), but also in disease-free survival (DFS) among patients with CRC.
Discussion
Normal tissue homeostasis is maintained by a balance between the proliferation and apoptosis of colonic epithelial cells. These activities are specifically localised within the intestinal crypt. In normal mucosa, predominantly proliferative activities are found at the lower part of the crypt, where stem cells reside and split into daughter cells; by contrast, greater apoptotic frequencies are localised to the top of the crypt because daughter cells proliferate and differentiate during their migration up and are shed into the lumen or eliminated by apoptosis upon reaching the top of the crypt [
11]. These gradients are reversed in adenomas, which feature increased proliferation towards the upper part of the crypt and more elevated levels of apoptosis at the bottom of the crypt; a greater overall rate of apoptosis is found in adenomas than in normal crypts [
4,
6,
12]. By contrast, apoptosis is not specifically localised in carcinomas [
6]. An explanation for these distribution patterns is provided by the role of programmed cell death in the control of genetic damage. The withdrawal of cells with DNA mutations through apoptosis, prevents the replication and expansion of these cells. This protective function explains why higher AIs may be found in tumours than in normal tissue, as these elevated AIs may indicate physiological attempts to eliminate the genetic alterations that are frequently found in neoplastic cells. It is true that tumour cells are able to develop mechanisms to evade apoptosis and become immortal. However, if only the neoplastic cells with mutations that inhibit apoptosis will survive and continue proliferating, then apoptosis serves to select the most aggressive cell specimens for tumour formation.
In addition to genetic damage, other factors, such as nutrient, growth factor or oxygen deficiencies, can also stimulate programmed cell death. Indeed, hypoxia is a common feature of most solid tumours because neoplasias that are undergoing rapid proliferation often overwhelm the capability of existing vessels to provide oxygen. Malignant cells need to adapt to their microenvironment, and this confers a more resistant phenotype to these cells, thereby increasing the risk of tumour progression [
4,
13].
Another link between cell death and carcinogenesis has been suggested. It has been observed that apoptotic cells can have an effect on the tumour microenvironment and the inmune response in the associated stroma, leading to an activation of neoplastic progression [
14]. Caspase 3, a marker for apoptosis, has been proposed as the key signal of dying tumour cells to stimulate the growth or surviving cells after radiotherapy [
15].
Thus, proliferation and apoptosis are coupled. However, although it is established knowledge that cell proliferation gradually increases with tumour progression, studies trying to clarify whether the same phenomenon occurs for apoptosis have produced dissenting results. It has been argued that these discrepancies could be related to lack of uniformity in the selection and preparation of tissue, influencing pre-analytical variables, especially cold ischemic time and formalin fixation process [
16]. Additionally, differences among the methods that are used for the detection of apoptosis could influence the data that are obtained in these studies. Nevertheless, regardless of the apoptotic detection method that is chosen, most authors have demonstrated an increase in the AIs that are observed during the course of the progression from normal mucosa to adenoma to carcinoma and a good correlation has been found when different methods have been compared, like M30 antibody or cleaved caspase 3 [
5‐
8,
17].
Moreover, the primary article that reported a progressive decrease in AIs from normal mucosa to carcinoma [
3] incorporates certain important methodological limitations, as Koornstra et al. have observed [
16]. Our findings clearly confirm that apoptosis upregulation is implicated in the colorectal carcinogenesis process that transforms normal tissue to premalignant and malignant lesions.
This progressive increase in apoptotic rate during the course of tumour development has been observed not only in CRC but also in other cancer types. For example, the AIs are greater in lymph node metastases than in primary breast carcinomas [
18], and AIs are also positively correlated with the pathologic grades of gliomas [
19]. AI elevation has also been observed in the carcinogenesis of the endometrium [
20] or the lung [
21]; according to the observations of Törmänen et al., the demonstrated AI in these contexts also increased with the severity of the dysplasias that were observed. In experiments with neoplastic stomach samples, less apoptosis was present in the early stages of gastric cancers than in advanced stages of these cancers, an observation that has been addressed by several different authors [
22,
23].
Once we have demonstrated the participation of apoptosis in carcinogenesis, the next logical step is to test its association with patient prognoses. These tests have been conducted both in CRC and in non-colorectal neoplasms [
24,
25]. The existing studies that have attempted to address the prognostic significance of AI in CRC have produced inconclusive results. Several investigations have demonstrated that reduced apoptosis is associated with adverse outcomes and metastatic stages, some of them only in case of distal colon carcinomas [
26], but more recent studies have suggested an inverse relationship between AI and survival [
9,
10,
27]. Because proliferation and apoptosis are closely related, it would not be unusual to discover that compared with tumours that develop over a more indolent course, more aggressive tumours are more proliferative and present higher AIs. In fact, both Watanabe et al. [
28] and Evertsson et al. [
29] observed an increase in apoptosis and proliferation activities during the course of tumour progression from early to advanced stages of CRC. The same conclusion was reached in a study of rectal cancer by Kim et al. [
30]; these researchers also linked apoptosis to lymphatic invasion. Recently, authors that were investigating the relationship between KRAS mutations and prognoses for CRC cases have observed that KRAS mutations lead to the higher turnover of colorectal tumour cells, which stimulates both mitosis and apoptosis and is related to a poor survival of CRC [
31].
Other markers have been used to study the relationship between apoptosis and survival. Thus, the prognostic significance of cleaved caspase 3 has been evaluated with varying conflicting results [
14,
32,
33]. Alternatively, when apoptosis was measured by M30 antibody, an association between elevated AI and reduced survival was observed [
34,
35].
In the present study, we report that a high AI is significantly associated with both decreased DFS and reduced OS among patients with invasive CRC. To our knowledge, this is the first time that these data are reported. As we expected, the AI was higher in the more advanced stages of the illness, a result that is in accordance with previously published findings [
29,
36]. Thus, apoptotic rates increase as tumours progress. Moreover, in advanced disease stages, a high AI is associated with a shorter DFS duration. Therefore, the determination of AI in stages III and IV may help to identify patients who might expect a worse outcome and would therefore most likely benefit from more intense regimens of chemotherapy.
In summary, our study demonstrates an increase in apoptosis during colorectal carcinogenesis and a distinct correlation between apoptotic rates and survival outcomes. At the present time, the importance of apoptosis and antiapoptotic signalling pathways in the pathogenesis and prognosis of CRC is being increasingly recognised. Molecules involved in these pathways represent potential diagnostic markers and therapeutic targets and are therefore the focus of numerous research efforts.
Competing interests
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
Authors’ contributions
MR conceived of the study, participated in its design, coordination, analysis and interpretation of data and supervised the writing of the manuscript. JA, TP, IR, and RF participated in data acquisition, quality control, analysis and interpretation. RC and MM performed the statistical analysis. JA drafted the manuscript. EPR contributed in manuscript editing. AR made substantial contributions to study design and manuscript review. All the authors made intellectual contributions, read and approved the final manuscript.