Prognostic Significance of DNA Ploidy in Hepatoma Patients

Lee, Sang Min; Choi, Dong Wook; Lee, Jong Inn; Paik, Nam Sun; Moon, Nan Mo; Jo, Kyeong Ja

Abstract

Hepatoma is one of the frequent cancers in Korea with an extremely poor prognosis. The prognostic factors in hepatoma are presence of venous invasion, multiplicity, size, and curative resection, but all things about prognosis are not elucidated yet. DNA ploidy pattern is one of the possible prognostic factors in HCC. Moreover, the study on DNA ploidy in Korean HCC is very scarce, so we studied DNA ploidy pattern in Korean HCC patients. We used formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded tissues from resected hepatoma specimens and the DNA ploidy was analysed with a flow cytometry system. Of the total 40 cases studied, 27 cases(67.5%) showed evaluable Coefficient of Variation(CV) level(less than 10). Among them 13 cases(48.1%) had an aneuploidy pattern. There were significant correlations between DNA ploidy and tumor size, presence of portal thrombi and TNM stage, although other conventional clinicopathologic prognostic factors did not show any significant correlation with DNA ploidy. In cases of tumors larger than 5 cm or presence of portal vein invasion, aneuploidy pattern was more frequently detected(p<0.05). But the prognostic significance of DNA ploidy pattern was not detected in resected hepatoma patients(p>0.1). Because of some limitation of paraffin-embedded tissue in flowcytometric analysis and heterogeneity of DNA ploidy pattern in HCC, we think that we should study multiple fresh samples in a prospective manner.