Abstract
Assessment of malignant potential by indentifying argyrophilic nucleoplar organizer regions (AgNORs) and immunostaining expression for CA19-9 was carried out in 50 human gastric cancers. The AgNORs count was significantly lower in early gastric cancer than in advanced gastric cancer. The AgNORs was correlated significantly with the macroscopic stage, the depth of invasion, peritoneal dissemination, and lymph node metastasis. Positive immunoreactivity for CA19-9 was found in 33 (66.0%) of the 50 gastric cancers. Tumors with strong immunostaining for CA19-9 had a significantly (P<0.05) higher AgNORs count than those with negative or weak immunostaining. The difference in survival time between the AgNORs count group (n=28, AgNORs count: <6.48) and the high AgNORs count group (n=22, AgNORs count: >6.48) was statistically significant (P<0.01).
These results suggest that evaluation of cellular kinetics using AgNORs gives important prognostic information, and that tumor cells with a high using AgNORs have the ability to produce high levels of CA19-9.
