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. 2016 Aug 16;6:31690. doi: 10.1038/srep31690

Figure 5. NR4A3 promoter hypermethylation and increased STAT3 activity correlate with poor survival in gastric cancer patients.

Figure 5

Quantitative real time MSP (qMSP) was performed to determine NR4A3 methylation levels in gastritis (n = 9) and primary gastric cancer (GC) patient samples (n = 88). NR4A3 methylation was significantly higher in (A) GC tumor samples and matched adjacent normal tissues, as compared to gastritis. NR4A3 methylation in tumor samples also showed a progressive increase with (B) stage and (C) grade. (D) Kaplan-Meier analysis of NR4A3 methylation in tumor tissues for overall survival of gastric cancer patients. GC patients with higher NR4A3 methylation demonstrated shorter overall survival than patients with lower methylation (log-rank test, **P = 0.003). (E) Kaplan-Meier analysis also showed that patients with higher STAT3 nuclear staining (“STAT3 IHC high,” red line, vs. “STAT3 IHC low, black line) had significantly (P = 0.0382) shorter overall survival than patients with lower STAT3 nuclear staining (representative STAT3 IHC images shown in right panel). (F) NR4A3 IHC, as performed on another independent cohort of 128 GC patient tumors, using tissue microarrays. Similar to high STAT3 IHC, Kaplan-Meier analysis also showed that patients with lower NR4A3 staining (“NR4A3 IHC low,” red line, vs. “NR4AC IHC low,” black lines) had shorter (P = 0.0272) overall survival than those with higher NR4A3 staining. Representative NR4A3 IHC images are shown in the right panel.