Vascular enumeration as a prognosticator for colorectal carcinoma

Vascular enumeration is thought to be an independent prognosticator for several human tumours, including breast, bladder and colorectal carcinomas. There have been 12 reports on the prognostic influence of vascular enumeration in colorectal carcinoma with different results. To test the prognostic influence of this factor in our patients, we have selected 126 patients with colorectal carcinoma Dukes' stages A to C treated only with curative surgery with no further adjuvant therapy. The minimal follow-up time was 5 years (60 months). After immunostaining with CD34, we performed a manual count of the vessels following Gasparini's criteria. In our series vascular enumeration showed significant association with the histological grade (P = 0.03) with a cut-off point at 77 vessels/200x, but not with tumour staging and vascular and neural invasion (P > 0.05). Vascular enumeration was a prognosticator for RFS (relapse-free survival) (P = 0.009) and OS (overall survival) (P = 0.01) in all Dukes' stages in the univariate analysis, but this prognostic influence was lost in the multivariate analysis, in which only stage, histological differentiation, location and vascular and neural invasion behaved as significant independent prognosticators.