PURPOSE Breast cancers in the early phase frequently undergo distant metastasis and survival of patients is greatly dependent on distant metastasis. The occurrence of micrometastasis has been suggested to relate with prognostic features of breast cancer, such as lymph node metastasis and the presence of vascular invasion. The aim of this study was to examine the presence of keratin-19 mRNA of e...

Experimental evidence indicates that tumour metastases can exist for long periods in a dormant state, with cell proliferation balancing cell death. However, this balance can be upset, by removing the primary tumour for instance, which causes the metastasis to grow, or by administering a substance inhibiting angiogenesis which causes the metastasis to regress. A mathematical model is presented f...

BACKGROUND. Findings of isolated (disseminated or circulating) tumor cells (ITC) by immunocytochemistry and molecular pathology methods have led to varied interpretations and different applications of the TNM system. METHODS. An analysis of the relevant literature was undertaken. In addition, optional proposals for the classification of ITC, micrometastasis, and cytologic results in pleural and...

BACKGROUND The chemokine and bone marrow-homing receptor CXCR4 has been implicated in metastatic dissemination of various cancers. We investigated CXCR4 expression in esophageal cancer specimens and its association with survival, lymph node microinvolvement, and bone marrow micrometastasis. METHODS We analyzed frozen tumor specimens from 136 patients with completely resected esophageal cancer...

The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of different sequences of pulmonary artery and vein ligations during lobectomy on blood micrometastasis of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Cytokeratin 19 (CK19)/adhesion molecule CD44v6 mRNA were used as markers. A total of 30 NSCLC patients undergoing pulmonary lobectomy were randomly divided into pulmonary artery (PA)-first and pulmonar...

OBJECTIVE We previously reported the results achieved in detecting sentinel lymph nodes (SLN). We applied the molecular techniques (RT-PCR) to improve the detection of micrometastasis in order to evaluate an improvement of staging in early non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients (pts). METHODS This study was carried out on 22 consecutive NSCLC pts with stage I disease. A dose of 37MBq (1 ...

AIM The purpose of this study is to develop a proteomic pattern for distinguishing individuals with colorectal cancer from healthy controls and monitoring micrometastasis using SELDI-TOF-MS. METHODS A training set consisting of 63 patients with colorectal cancer, 20 patients with benign colorectal diseases and 26 healthy volunteers was used to develop a proteomic model that discriminated colo...

The predictive value of lymph node micrometastasis, detected by immunohistochemical or genetic methods, is well appreciated in terms of prognosis. However, a major problem is high false-positive rates, because most methods focus on cytokeratin, which is a component not only of carcinoma but also normal epithelial and nonepithelial cells. Mutant allele-specific amplification (MASA) can detect DN...