| Abstract: | A tumour can only successfully propagate if it develops its own blood supply. Human cancers show a great propensity for stimulating neoangiogenesis through a variety of mechanisms. The present study investigates the relationship between neoangiogenesis, metastasis and survival in 51 patients with tongue cancer resected surgically, 26 of whom had lymph node metastases treated by radical neck dissection. The vessels were immunolabelled for CD34. Two parameters were studied: the vessel count/mm-2 (VC) and the vessel count corrected for the relative proportions of carcinoma and stroma (VV). The data were analysed by uni variate and multivariate methods. The median VC was 35 and the VV was 103. Patients with neck node metastases tended to have a lower VV (93) than those with no metastases (114) (P = 0.0489). The tumour specific survival of the whole groups of patients was 59% (95% confidence intervals, 37–74%) and not surprisingly the patients with neck node metastases had a poorer survival than those without neck node metastases (,P = 0.0083). Cox’s proportional hazards model demon strated that patients with a low VC index tended to have a good prognosis (P = 0.0234). Previous studies of neoangiogenesis in head and neck squamous carcinoma have been limited and the present investigation suggests that VV is associated with metastases, and that VC may be an indicator of prognosis. |
