Morphometric study of tumor angiogenesis as a new prognostic factor in nasopharyngeal carcinoma patients

[摘要] The aim of this study was to determine the possible prognostic significance of tumor angiogenesis (TA) in nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) patients. Fiftyfive NPC patients were evaluated in relation to survival. Endothelial cells were immunohistochemically stained with anti-von Willebrand factor (F-VIII), CD-31 and CD-34 antibodies, and microvessels counted in the most active areas of tumor neovascularization or hotspots using both a manual and an automatic method. Overall survival analysis calculated by theKaplan-Meier test revealed that both methods were correlated with a statistical significance between intratumoral microvessel density (IMD) and overall survival, using either manual (p = 0.0141) or automatic counting (p = 0.0117). Other angiogenic parameters studied were perimeter, roundness and accumulative area of the microvessels using a morphometric analyzer. Moreover, our results show that cases with high IMD demonstrated a prognostic significance in relation to the accumulative area (p = 0.0072).

[学科分类] 生理学与病理学

[关键词] nasopharyngeal carcinona