In 1949, French described a carcinoma of the ovary with malignant cells in the patient's vaginal smears. The infrequency of this finding is indicated by sparsity of subsequent similar articles.
Cancer cells were detected in the vaginal smear from a 51 year old woman who had been radically operated on for right breast cancer 4 years previously.
Her chief complaints were a lower abdominal tumor and abnormal genital bleeding.
The malignant cells in the smear were suspected from morphology of the cells which had large, prominent and red nucleoli, and coarsely granulated neclei, and formed papillary arrangement. Patholo gical examination of postoperative specimens proved the presence of metastatic adenocarcinoma in the right ovary from the right breast cancer. Another metastasis was found in the peritoneal cavity. It is considered that the appearance of cancer cells in the vaginal smear was due to the passage of the cancer cells through the Fallopian tube from the peritoneal cavity.
