Tumor differentiation as related to sentinel lymph node status in gastric cancer
Ron Lavy1, Andronik Kapiev1, Yehuda Hershkovitz1
1Ron Lavy, Andronik Kapiev, Yehuda Hershkovitz, Natan Poluksht, Igor Rabin, Bar Chikman, Zahar Shapira, Ilan Wasserman, Ariel Halevy, Division of Surgery, Assaf Harofeh Medical Center, Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel-Aviv University, Ramat Aviv, Zerifin 70300, Israel.
Aim:
To investigate the influence of tumor grade on sentinel lymph node (SLN) status in patients with gastric cancer (GC).
Methods:
We retrospectively studied 71 patients with GC who underwent SLN mapping during gastric surgery to evaluate the relationship between SLN status and tumor grade.
Results:
Poorly differentiated tumors were detected in 50/71 patients, while the other 21 patients had moderately differentiated tumors. SLNs were identified in 58/71 patients (82%). In 41 of the 58 patients that were found to have stained nodes (70.7%), the tumor was of the poorly differentiated type (group I), while in the remaining patients with stained nodes 17/58 (29.3%), the tumor was of the moderately differentiated type (group II). Positive SLNs were found in 22/41 patients in group I (53.7%) and in 7/17 patients in group II (41.2%) (P = 0.325). The rate of positivity for the SLNs in the two groups (53.7% vs 41.2%) was not statistically significant (P = 0.514).
Conclusion:
Most of our patients were found to have poorly differentiated adenocarcinoma of the stomach and there was no correlation between tumor grade and SLN involvement.
