ABSTRACT
Background: Bone marrow biopsy is widely used method for diagnosis, followup and staging of hemato-oncologic diseases. This procedure is also used for determining the bone marrow metastasis in patients with solid tumors. In this study, clinical, hematological, and pathological features of 58 patients with bone marrow metastases diagnosed by bone marrow biopsies were examined retrospectively Materials and Methods: Among 3345 bone marrow biopsies performed in our hospital between January 2006 and August 2013, 58 cases with solid tumor metastasized to bone marrow were included in this study. Results: Among 58 cases with solid organ carcinoma metastasis in bone marrow, mean age was 59.9. Thirty-nine cases were found to have a known primary tumor focus. The most common tumors metastasized to bone marrow were breast carcinomas (23 patients, 59%), gastric carcinomas (6 patients, 15.3%), prostate carcinomas (4 patients, 10,2%), and lung carcinomas (3 patients, 7.7%), respectively. Nineteen patients were firstly diagnosed from bone marrow biopsies as metastatic carcinomas. The median overall survival after bone marrow metastasis was 28 days (95% confidence interval: 7.5-48.4). The median overall survival difference was not statistically significant between patients with primary known and unknown tumor (P = 0.973). Statistically significant difference was observed between the survival of breast cancer and gastric cancer (P = 0.028). The most common hematologic symptom was the coexistence of anemia and thrombocytopenia (31%), thrombocytopenia (27.6%) and anemia (20.7%) alone. The median overall survival difference was statistically significant between patients who have anemia and thrombocytopenia (P < 0.005). Conclusion: Bone marrow biopsy is an easily accessible, easily applied, a useful procedure for diagnosing metastatic diseases in patients with hematologic symptoms such as anemia and thrombocytopenia besides being an uncomfortable procedure for patients. Furthermore, it is useful in predicting the prognosis and short survey after diagnosing bone marrow metastasis.
ABSTRACT
Background: Melanoma is quite a heterogeneous group of diseases of the skin. Prognostic markers of tumor behavior are important to precisely assign individual patients for appropriate treatment protocols. Aim: The aim of our first study was to investigate nucleophosmin expression in melanoma patients and to determine its relationship with the tumor characterictics and patient prognosis. Materials and Methods: We analyzed the immunohistochemical expression of nucleophosmin in 55 melanoma patients. The immunostaining pattern was classified into two groups: Diffuse nuclear and nucleolar relocalization. We also investigated the relationship between the expression of nucleophosmin and the clinicopathological parameters sucssh as Clark level, tumor thickness, stage, histological type, location, and survey. Results: In all cases the neoplastic cells were strongly positive for nucleophosmin (14 cases diffuse nuclear, 41 cases nucleolar relocalization). No correlation was demonstrated between the expression pattern of nucleophosmin and the clinicopathological parameters and survey. Conclusions: The implications of our results, nevertheless, are that the immunohistochemical detection of nucleophosmin is not a valuable tool for predicting the outcome of patients with melanoma or identifying subgroups of patients who may be at a higher risk.