AgNORs as Prognostic Factor of Gastric Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma

Junichi Hasegawa, Kazuyasu Nakao, Masaaki Nakahara, Nobuo Ogino, Toshirou Nishida, Masahiro Tsujimoto*, Masayasu Hamaji**

Department of Surgery and Pathology*, Osaka Police Hospital, Departments of Surgery, National Kure Hospital**

The utility of nucleolar organizer regions-associated proteins (AgNORs) for estimating proliferative activity and prognosis of gastric non-Hodgkin's lymphomas (NHL) was examine. Formalin-fixed and paraffin-embedded sections of 31 patients with gastric NHL were used. AgNORs count was taken as a mean dot number of 100 nuclei. The AgNORs count revealed a good correlation with S-phase fraction measured by flow cytometry (p<0.01). Several histologic and clinical factors including AgNORs count were evaluated as prognostic factors by single variant analysis, and it was proved that Naqvi classification, AgNORs count and resectability were significant prognostic factors (p<0.01) . Among these factors, Cox's multivariate analysis indicated that AgNORs count was a most important prognostic factor (p<0.05). In patients with curative surgery, AgNORs count of relapsed cases after operation were higher than that of not relapsed cases (p<0.01). These results suggest that AgNORs count reflects proliferative activity and is useful as a prognostic index of gastric NHL.

Key words
gastric non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, DNA analysis, nucleolar organizer regions-associated protein

Reprint requests
Junichi Hasegawa First Department of Surgery, Osaka University Medical School
2-2 Yamadaoka, Suita, 565 JAPAN

Accepted
September 14, 1994

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