Abstract:

Cutaneous basal cell carcinoma (BCC) and squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) are the most popular neoplastic entities in cutaneous medicine. These two neoplasms are commonly well recognized on the basis of their clinical and histopathological features and the differentiation between the two mentioned carcinomas is clinically important as there is a significant difference in their rates of aggressiveness and metastatic potential. In case of difficulties in distinguishing BCC from SCC, in addition to the well-defined histological criteria, immunohistochemistry methods can be used and, in the literature, numerous studies underline their usefulness. Therefore, the present systematic review aimed to assess the expression of epithelial membrane antigen (EMA), cluster of differentiation 10 (CD10), carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA), and B-cell lymphoma-2 (Bcl-2) in distinguishing cutaneous BCC from SCC. A comprehensive search was done from 1983 to September 2017 in the PubMed/Medline, Web of Science, and Scopus databases without language restriction. The studies had a cross-sectional design on human tissue. The pooled staining of biomarkers showed that staining results of EMA and CEA in SCC tissues were significantly more positive than in BCC tissues (p<0.00001 and p=0.008, respectively), as well as CD10 and Bcl-2 in BCC tissues, were significantly more positive than in SCC tissues (p<0.00001 and p<0.00001, respectively). Findings demonstrate that the use of these markers will be very useful in mentioned cases in which routine microscopy is not able to distinguish between these two entities.

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