Evaluation of DNA ploidy in endometrial cancer

We performed a study to evaluate the relationships between the surgical stage (FIGO, 1989), histological tumor grade, myometrial invasion, peritoneal cytology, lymph node metastasis and prognosis, and DNA ploidy determined by flow cytometry in paraffin-embedded blocks of resected cancer lesions from 76 patients with uterine corpus cancer (adenocarcinoma endometrial type) who had been surgically treated in our hospital. The coefficient of variation was 5.00% on average (3.40 to 5.30%) in DNA histograms of the 76 patients. DNA aneuploid was detected in 18 patients (24%) and tended to be more frequently found in association with advanced surgical stage, higher histological tumor grade, deeper myometrial invasion, positive lymph node metastasis, and positive peritoneal cytology. Kaplan-Meier method was used to analyze the relationship between prognosis and DNA ploidy in 76 patients with uterine corpus cancer, in 36 with surgical stage III, and in 26 with surgical stage IIIa, resulting in prognosis which was significantly better in patients with DNA diploid. The results of multivariate analysis also indicate that DNA ploidy is an independent prognostic factor of uterine corpus cancer. These results suggest that DNA ploidy should be an important parameter for predicting prognosis of uterine corpus cancer.