| Summary: | <p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Altered androgen hormone homeostasis and androgen receptor (AR) activity have been implicated in ovarian carcinogenesis but the relationship between AR expression in ovarian cancer and clinical outcome remains unclear.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>In this study, the prognostic impact of AR expression was investigated using immunohistochemistry in tissue microarrays from 154 incident cases of epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) in the prospective, population-based cohorts Malmö Diet and Cancer Study and Malmö Preventive Project. A subset of corresponding fallopian tubes (n = 36) with no histopathological evidence of disease was also analysed.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>While abundantly expressed in the majority of fallopian tubes with more than 75% positive nuclei in 16/36 (44%) cases, AR was absent in 108/154 (70%) of EOC cases. AR expression was not related to prognosis in the entire cohort, but in the serous subtype (n = 90), AR positivity (> 10% positive nuclei) was associated with a prolonged disease specific survival in univariate (HR= 0.49; 95% CI 0.25-0.96; p= 0.038) and multivariate (HR= 0.46; 95% CI 0.22-0.97; p= 0.042) analysis, adjusted for age, grade and clinical stage.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>AR expression is considerably reduced in EOC as compared to fallopian tubes, and in EOC of the serous subtype, high AR expression is a favourable prognostic factor. These results indicate that assessment of AR expression might be of value for treatment stratification of EOC patients with serous ovarian carcinoma.</p>
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