1995 Volume 34 Issue 4 Pages 766-772
We evaluated the effects of chemotherapy for breast cancer and metastatic liver cancer using aspiration biopsy cytology.
In 3 patients with breast cancer and 14 patients with liver metastases (10 from colorectal cancer and 4 from gastric cancer), cancer cells were obtained by the aspiration technique before and after treatment with intra-arterial infusion chemotherapy combined with local hyperthermotherapy. The degeneration indices (DI) of cancer cells were scored with predetermined criteria before and after treatment, and the correlation between changes in DI and the clinical response rate to treatment was investigated.
The morphological changes in cancer cells consisted mainly of nuclear changes such as enlarged or swollen nuclei, giant cell formation with multiple nuclei and rough nuclear chromatin. The change in DI showed a good correlation with the rate of clinical responsiveness to treatment, and all of the patients with a DI difference exceeding 5 points between pre-and post-treatment showed a partial response to chemotherapy. There was a significant correlation between the DI difference and the survival period in patients with liver metastases from colorectal cancer (P<0.001).
These results suggest that the DI change in cancer cells obtained by aspiration biopsy cytology is a useful means of evaluating chemotherapeutic effects at the local level and may serve as a prognostic parameter in patients with liver metastases from colorectal cancer.
