[Detection of early stage cancer: pathological aspect with special reference to differential diagnosis]

Various kinds of lesions exist which should be discriminate from malignant or premalignant or borderline lesions. If there were a morphologic technical procedure on detection of malignant transformation of the cells at the initiation stage, before the lesion would develop a definitely identical with malignant lesion, such method must be most highly applicable for pathologists. DNA diagnosis has realized a warning of diagnosis of certain diseases or genetical maldevelopment prior to develop their clinical manifestation. Gene analysis has introduced in ++phragmatical screening test for certain diseases such as diabetes mellitus, thalassemia, T-cell leukemia or lymphoma, neuroblastoma, muscular dystrophy of Duchenne or Becker type, Ph' chromosome and so on. Immunohistochemical technology has provided an intracellular oncogene detection in some neoplastic malignancies such as n-myc in neuroblastoma. Amplification of c-erb B2 (also referred as neu and HER-2/neu) has indicated a higher malignant mammary carcinoma with poor-prognosis, even their size small and early stage. Oncogene analysis is expected to be available sperimposing on pathological morphology.