Fig. 3

Fluctuations in the CAF counts induced by primary tumor resection in patients diagnosed with different stages of PC (a) Box and whisker plot represents the CAF counts from patients diagnosed with grade 1 prostate adenocarcinoma, before and after primary tumor resection (mean ± SD, n = 34 from 9 patients). There were significantly fewer (*P = 0.0422) CAFs after 2 weeks post-surgery compared with the baseline, as calculated using one-way ANOVA. (b) CAF counts from patients diagnosed with grade 2 and 4 prostate adenocarcinoma through primary tumor resection (n = 15 from 4 patients). There was no significant change found (P = 0.8020) in the CAF counts in these patients, as calculated using one-way ANOVA. (c) Immunofluorescence staining of CAFs isolated from PC patients (red is CD45, green is alpha-SMA and blue is DAPI). Scale bar represents 20 μm. (d) A stacked column chart represents CAF counts from patients with the same cancer stage and surgical resection outcomes (n = 8 samples from 2 patients)