Mib-1 evaluated proliferative activity in ovarian cancer with respect to prognostic significance

In the present study, tumor tissue of 251 patients with ovarian cancer was immunohistochemically analysed for proliferative activity using the monoclonal antibody mib-1 and the analyse system CAS 200. The rate of the growth fraction varied from 0% to 71% mib-1 positive tumor cells with a median of 17%. There was a strongly significant association between proliferative activity and the degree of histological differentiation (p = 0.0005), whereas there was no significant correlation with tumor stage and histological subtypes. Using the median as the cut-off point, patients with higher proliferating tumors (> or = 17%) had a statistically significant worse prognosis (p = 0.0431). Especially in the group of patients with grade 1 and grade 2 tumors, measurement of the proliferative activity is of help for prediction of the postoperative survival time of patients (p = 0.0336), suggesting that measurement of the growth fraction estimated by mib-1 reflects more closely the degree of tumor differentiation. However, multivariate analyses cannot confirm these results.