Bahrain Medical Bulletin, Vol

The cervix is commonly affected with various conditions including disorders of epithelial maturation, hyperplasia, benign tumors, dysplasia, and malignant neoplasms. Squamous cell carcinomas at all sites, evolve through a sequence of changes occurring in the normal squamous epithelium, ranging from dysplasia of varying degree to frank malignancy. Cell proliferation is an important feature of dysplasia and carcinoma. Simple indices can be used to measure cell proliferation. These include: 1) Mitotic index: This is the percentage of mitoses in the lesion. The mitotic index is the oldest method of measuring proliferative activity and can be very useful to diagnose malignancy. 2) Argyrophilic nucleolar organiser region (AgNOR) index: This is a count of the nucleolar organiser regions (NORs). NORs are loops of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) that encode ribosomal ribonucleic acid (RNA) and are located in the nuclei of all cells. The proteins of NORs are argyrophilic and can be stained by a silver staining method (AgNOR technique). The number of silver binding dots is a valuable marker of proliferative activity as it reflects the extent of ribosomal biogenesis. ________________________________________________________________________ * Professor ** Ex-Postgraduate student *** Professor and Head Department of Pathology M S Ramaiah Medical College Bangalore, India