Relationship between Flow Cytometric Features and Clinical Behavior of Meningiomas

Kim, J H; Chung, Y S; Kim, D G; Jung, H W; Kim, H J; Choi, K S; Han, D H

Abstract

Meningiomas have a wide range of biological potential and clinical behavior. Histological findings are helpful in recognizing the malignant potential of a given tumor, but often fail to correlate with clinical and biological behavior such as a gross feature, the liability of recurrence, and the extent of associated cerebral edema. To find alternate approaches to improve the correlation between clinical and biological behavior, 18 meningiomas were studied by flow cytometry(FCM) using paraffin embedded tissues for deoxyribonucleic acid(DNA). The results were summarized as follows ; 1) Fifteen cases were diploid and remaining three cases were aneuploid. The latter were two cases of an angioblastic meningioma, and one case of a malignant meningioma which recurred two years later. 2) No relationships were found between the results of ploidy analysis and the age, sex, the site of neoplasms, the size of neoplasms, the degree of peripheral edema, mitotic index, recurrence and the histological subtypes(p>0.1), but it was interesting to note that all three aneuploid cases were clinically and biologically aggressive meningiomas. 3) The proliferative index(PI : %S+%G2M) between diploid and aneuploid cases had a statistically significant trend(0.050.1). 5) The PI value was relatively correlated with the size and the extent of associated cerebral edema(0.05