Immunohistochemistry and Reverse Transcriptase Polymerase Chain Reaction on Sentinel Lymph Nodes can Improve the Accuracy of Nodal Staging in Breast Cancer Patients

Abstract

In this study the nodal staging sensitivity of sentinel lymph node biopsy (SLNB) with detailed pathological and molecular biological examination has been investigated and compared to that of axillary lymph node dissection (ALND) with routine histological evaluation. Sentinel lymph nodes (SLNs) were removed by the dual-agent injection technique in 68 patients with primary, clinically node-negative breast cancer. Forty-seven patients had negative SLNs according to hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) staining. These H&E-negative SLNs were serially sectioned and examined at 250 µm levels by anticytokeratin immunohistochemistry (IHC). In 14 patients the SLNs were also investigated by cytokeratin 20 (CK20) reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). SLNB with IHC increased the node-positive rate by 26% (by 40% in tumors less than or equal to 2 cm in size (pT1) and by 9% in tumors more than 2 cm but less than or equal to 5 cm in size (

Detection of lymph node metastases of papillary thyroid cancer—comparison of the results of histopathology, immunohistochemistry and reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction—a preliminary report

“…They have the advantage of a higher sensitivity and the possibility of researching not only single sections of a lymph node in a single examination. RT-PCR is a rapidly developing technique, which has been successfully applied to the investigation of micrometastases of many solid, malignant, tumours such as: gastric cancer, colorectal cancer, prostate cancer, breast cancer, pancreatic cancer [36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44]. In gastrointestinal cancers, detection of micrometastases by molecular methods, in histopathologically negative lymph nodes, was the most important factor indicating a possibility of local relapse and the need for more aggressive treatment [35][36][37].…”