Incidence and significance of GATA3 positivity in gallbladder adenocarcinoma.

GATA3 immunostaining is a sensitive marker for mammary and urothelial carcinomas. It is routinely used in surgical pathology during workup of carcinomas of unknown origin. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first focused study of GATA3 expression in gallbladder adenocarcinomas. In this study, we evaluated GATA3 expression in 38 gallbladder adenocarcinomas. Eight of 38 (21%) gallbladder adenocarcinomas were positive for GATA3. The expression of GATA3 tended to be moderate to strong when present. It was patchy (<50% positivity) in 4 cases, characterized by discrete clusters or groups of malignant cells with areas of intervening negative tumor cells, whereas it was diffuse (>50% positivity) in the other 4 cases. GATA3 expression did not show any significant correlation with clinicopathologic features such as sex, histologic grade, perineural invasion, vascular invasion, pathologic stage, or distance metastasis. The results of our study show that a subset of gallbladder adenocarcinomas (21%) can be GATA3 positive. Awareness of this phenomenon is important while working up GATA3-positive carcinomas immunohistochemically.

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