Expression of ubiquitin C-terminal hydrolase L1 in triple-negative breast cancer and its relationship with clinicopathological features and prognosis

MEI Xinglin; ZHANG Hao; WANG Zheng

doi:10.13276/j.issn.2097-1656.2025.07.008

Abstract：Objective To explore the expression of ubiquitin C-terminal hydrolase L1(UCHL1)in triple-negative breast cancer(TNBC)tissues,and to provide corresponding evaluation indexes and scientific theoretical basis for the prognosis of TNBC patients through the correlation analysis with pathological characteristics and prognosis of clinical patients.Methods A total of 120 cases of TNBC patients' wax blocks archived in Department of Pathology,Nanyang Central Hospital from September 2015 to September 2017 were collected,and 60 patients who underwent surgical treatment for benign breast diseases during the same period were selected as controls.Immunohistochemistry was used to detect the expression level of UCHL1 in TNBC tissues and tissues of benign breast lesions,and age,tumor stage,whether lymph nodes were metastatic or not and other clinicopathological parameters of the patients followed up between the two groups were counted.Subsequently,x2 in multivariate analysis was used to analyze the expression of UCHL1 in benign breast tumors and TNBC as well as its relationship with clinicopathological features,and the corresponding relationship between prognostic disease-free survival and clinicopathological features was further analyzed.Logistic regression was used to analyze the prognostic factors,and Kaplan-Meier method was used to plot the survival curves.Results The expression of UCHL1 in TNBC tissues was significantly higher than that in benign breast tissues(60.83％vs 26.67％,P＜0.05).The expression of UCHL1 in the tissues of TNBC patients was associated with lymph node metastasis,tumor diameter,and clinical stage(P＜0.05),but not with age and menopause(P＞0.05).UCHL1-positive patients had shorter disease-free survival compared with negative patients(P＜0.05).The disease-free survival rate of UCHL1-positive TNBC patients was 54.8％(40/73),which was significantly less than that of negative patients(87.2％,41/47),with a statistically significant difference(P＜0.05).The results of multivariate analysis showed that the prognosis of TNBC patients was significantly correlated with UCHL1 expression,clinical stage and tumor size.Conclusion The expression of UCHL1 is closely related to the poor prognosis of TNBC patients,and UCHL 1-negative patients obtain longer disease-free survival,while its positive expression suggests a poor prognosis in patients.