Table 1.

CD73 expression levels and clinical and pathological findings of 64 patients with rectal cancer treated with neoadjuvant radiation therapy

Variable	Tumor cells (64)				Stroma (64)
	Low (38)	High (22)	Unknown (4)	p-value	Low (27)	High (37)	p-value
Age	63 (36–78)	59 (42–79)	66 (63–68)	0.13	61 (36–74)	62 (44–79)	0.8
Gender
M	29	16	3	0.77	19	29	0.56
F	9	6	1		8	8
Location
Rab	2	1		0.69	2	1	0.48
Rb	36	21			25	36
Histology
Differentiated	32	20		0.7	22	31	0.46
Undifferentiated	6	2			2	6
Lymphatic invasion
Absent	24	11		0.42	17	22	0.8
Present	14	11			10	15
Venous invasion
Absent	13	9		0.78	10	16	0.8
Present	25	13			17	21
Tumor Stage
t0/t1	4	0	4	0.48	5	3	0.35
t2	9	5			7	7
t3	23	14			12	25
t4	2	3			3	2
N stage
n0	23	15		0.59	17	25	0.79
n1<	15	7			10	12
Pathological response
grade 0/1	25	17		0.29	18	24	0.63
grade 2	13	5	1		7	12
grade 3	0	0	3		2	1
Combined Chemotherapy
Not given	3	4	0	0.31	4	3	0.2
Given	35	18	4		23	34
Adjuvant chemotherapy
Given	16	5		0.13	9	12	0.99
Not Given	22	17	4		18	25
Recurrence
Present	11	11		0.16	6	16	0.11
Absent	27	11	4		21	21

CD73 expression in tumor cells cannot be appropriately evaluated in 1 patient with a grade 2 response due to few remaining tumor cells as well as in 3 patients with grade 3 responses (pathological complete response). Statistical significance of the differences was evaluated by student-t-test, the Mann-Whitney test, the χ²-test and Fisher’s exact test