الفهرس 
Aqueous HumorOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Retinoblastoma is the most common primary intraocular malignancy (eye cancer) of childhood, with high mortality and morbidity rates. Finding improved biomarkers with high sensitivity and specificity for reliable detection of early stage disease and capable of evaluating the prognosis of the condition, remains an important challenge for retinoblastoma management.
Survivin is a novel cell cycle regulated caspase inhibitor that inhibits apoptosis. It is highly expressed in rapidly dividing tumors, but not in normal adult tissues. Elevated survivin levels were reported in many malignant tumors, suggesting a role in carcinogenesis.
Transforming growth factor beta-1 (TGF- β1) is a potent cytokine. It acts as an antiproliferative factor in normal epithelial cells as well as at early stages of oncogenesis by inducing apoptosis and arresting cells in the G1 phase of the cell cycle. Nevertheless, it is over expressed in many tumors, and thought to be related to tumor transformation and progression. Malignant cells do not respond to the growth inhibitory action of TGF-β1 because they contain mutations or deletions in genes important to TGF-β1 signaling.
Depending on the fact that survivin and TGF- β1 are intracellular markers that can be shed into the surrounding body fluids, the current study aimed to investigate the expression and the possible relationship between TGF-β1 and survivin in retinoblastoma, and to assess their correlation with the clinicopathological features. Moreover, this study aimed to elucidate the usefulness of survivin and TGF-β1 as diagnostic and prognostic tumor markers patients with retinoblastoma in terms of sensitivity, specificity and accuracy, in comparison to the conventional retinoblastoma tumor marker LDH .