Prognostic roles of signal transducers and activators of transcription family in human breast cancer

Abstract

Signal transducers and activators of transcription (STAT) family are critical transcription factors, which have been proved as prognostic predictors for a number of cancers. However, the prognostic roles of STAT family in breast cancer patients remain in dispute. In the present study, we mined the ‘Kaplan–Meier plotter’ (KM plotter) online database to explore the prognostic roles of STAT family mRNA expression in breast cancer including overall survival (OS), progression-free survival (PFS), as well as post-progression survival (PPS). The results suggest high mRNA expression of all the individual STATs, except STAT1 and STAT2, are significantly associated with favorable OS in breast cancer patients; high STAT1 mRNA expression is significantly associated with worse RFS and all the other individual STATs, except STAT3, are significantly associated with better RFS in breast cancer patients; only high STAT5b mRNA expression is significantly related to better PPS in breast cancer patients. Additionally, we explored the prognostic values of individual STATs in other clinicopathological features, such as pathological grades, estrogen receptor (ER) status and so on. The results suggest, except STAT2 and STAT6, high mRNA expression of STATs is related to a favorable prognosis especially for high pathological grade; high STAT5 mRNA expression indicates a favorable prognosis no matter under ER positive or negative status; high STAT4 mRNA expression suggests a favorable prognosis under human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) negative status. Our results indicate that individual STATs, except STAT1 and STAT2, may act as a favorable prognostic biomarker in breast cancer. Nevertheless, further investigations on a larger population are warranted.