| 摘要: | The incidence of head and neck cancers, in particular oral cancer, increases significantly in Taiwan in the recent two decades. The oral cancer has become a high-risk disease in Taiwan just because of the dramatic change of life style and diet, such as betel quid chewing and cigarette smoking, and the increase of incidence frequency is phenomenal. In spite of the aggressive surgical treatment, tumor recurrence and distant metastasis remain the major causes of treatment failure. Although radical surgery is a good treatment method for patients at the early stages, for patients in the advanced condition, predicting factor for supplementing adjuvant therapy and improving quality of life become essential. Among these, factors for measuring drug and radiation sensitivities are important. Indeed, for the better understanding of carcinogenesis, proliferation pattern, metastatic potentiality and drug responses, several molecular methods have been applied to characterize the differences of mRNA expression spectra between various cancer cells and normal counterparts. Among these, cDNA subtraction, serial analysis of gene expression (SAGE), cDNA microarray, proteomics and differential display were most frequently utilized. By combining these methods, many genes have been detected, e.g., expressions of dihydrodiol dehydrogenase, nm23 and chk2, and their association with drug resistance. The biological function of these genes in the disease progression of head and neck cancer, however, remains to be characterized by further studies. |
