Epstein—Barr病毒与鼻咽癌关系的分子病理学研究

Study of the relation between Epstein-Barr virus and nasopharyngeal carcinoma by molecular pathological method

Using in situ hybridization method, we investigated the presence of Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) DNA in the biopsy tissues of 60 cases of nasopharyngeal carcinoma from Shaanxi Province and 30 cases of chronic inflammation of nasopharyngeal mucosa. Fourty cases of other malignant tumors (hepatocellular and gastric carcinoma) were also observed as controls. We also performed the combined study of imrnunofluorescent cytochemistry and in situ hybridization to measure serum levels of antibody in 12 cases of poorly differentiated squamous cell carcinoma (PDC) randomly sampled from the above 60 cases. The results of in situ hybridization show that the positive rates of well differentiated carcinoma (WDC), PDC and undifferentiated carcinoma (UDC) were 30%, 73%, and 90%, respectively. The positive rate in WDC was significantly lower than that in PDC and UDC (P<0.01). Three cases of 30 nasopharyngeal mucosa chronic inflammation epithelial samples were detectable in EBV-DNA; however, other kinds of tumors were negative. Eleven (91% ) of 12 cases of PUD showed strong positivity in serum VCA-IgA, and 9 (75%) cases among them were positive in hybridization. The results of this study suggest that EBV infection is probably an important factor in the etiology of NPC in Shaanxi Province.