As a negative modulator of the canonical Wnt signaling pathway, Naked1 (NKD1) is widely expressed in many normal tissues. However, the expression and clinicopathological significance of NKD1 in patients with breast cancer is still unclear. The aim of this study was to evaluate NKD1 expression in breast cancer and to investigate the question of whether reduced expression of NKD1 may have any pathological significance in breast cancer development or progression. In this study, we performed western blotting and immunohistochemistry to evaluate the expression of NKD1 and relevance with clinicopathological factors in the breast invasive ductal carcinoma. Reduction of NKD1 was significantly correlated with lymph node metastasis, histological grade and ER expression in breast cancer. Patients with negative NKD1 expression had significantly lower cumulative postoperative 5 year survival rate than those with positive NKD1 expression. This interpretation is in keeping with the results obtained from our in vitro experiments on MDA-MB-231 cells, we demonstrated that upregulation of NKD1 expression by infect with an adenovirus containing a NKD1 vector significantly reduced the migration of breast cancer cells. These data suggest that NKD1 plays an important role in invasion in human breast cancer and it appears to be a potential prognostic marker for patients with breast cancer.
Keywords: Breast carcinoma; NKD1; metastasis; prognostic marker.