Tehran University Medical Journal

---

Breast cancer is a major cause of mortality in women due to malignant diseases and is the most prevalent type of cancer in western countries. According to investigations which has been done in Iran so far, the prevalence of disease in our country is also very high, therefore complete attention to clinical and pathological findings of this disease would be extremely essential. In this study, the direct relationship between axillary lymph node involvement and the aggressiveness of invasive ductal carcinoma has been brought into consideration. This study is a case series of 90 patients which all of them have had radical mastectomy because of breast cancer and all their samples has been referred to the center of pathology of Imam hospital. Based on modified Bloom-Richardson grading, all the samples have been graded. The study of all lymph node samples related to above cases has also been conducted along with the main study. The most frequent ages of disease was 31 to 40 and left breast had most involvement. From all cases, 12.2% were in grade I with 27.2% lymph node involvement, 66.7% grade II with 73.4% lymph node involvement and 21.1% in grade III with 100% lymph node involvement (P=0.00008). Based on statistical analysis we concluded that the axillary lymph node involvement in breast cancer is strongly associated with the aggressiveness of invasive ductal carcinoma. This important point should not be neglected in planning for treatment of this kind of disease.

---

Background: It is well known that, at the time of the initial presentation of patients with non-small cell lung cancer, N-status is very important in accurate staging and avoiding inappropriate surgical procedures. Also, if mediastinal lymph node metastasis (N2) of non-small cell lung cancer (stage IIIA) is present, neoadjuvant (preoperative) chemora-diotherapy is indicated therefore a quick and accurate N-status determination is critical before thoracotomy. We compared the usefulness and accuracy of touch imprint and frozen section analysis for this purpose.

Methods: During 2006, fifty eight mediastinal lymph node specimens from 27 patients with lung cancer were excised. After touch imprint preparation, half of each lymph node was sent for frozen section and finally permanent histology.

Results: Frozen section and touch imprint had only one and two false negative results, respectively, but neither had false positive reports. The sensitivity, specificity and accuracy of the frozen section evaluation was 95.5%, 100% and 98.2%, respectively, and those of touch imprint were, 90.9%, 100% and 96.4%. The differences in the sensitivity, specificity and accuracy between the two methods were not significant (p>0.05).

Conclusion: Frozen section and touch imprint have similarly high accuracies for detecting mediastinal lymph node metastasis in lung cancer. However, since the touch imprint method is more rapid and simple, it maybe method of choice.