Confirmation of the prognostic value of the ECPI-1 score (myometrial invasion, DNA-ploidy and mean shortest nuclear axis) in FIGO stage I endometrial cancer patients with long follow-up.

In FIGO stage I endometrial cancer patients, histologic type and grade are correlated with prognosis and used for therapeutic decision making. However, assessment of these histologic features is subjective, and the results are not always perfectly reproducible. Contrarily, previous studies have shown that DNA-ploidy and morphometric features are highly reproducible and have a strong prognostic value in these cancers. Multivariate analysis has demonstrated that a combination of mean shortest nuclear axis (MSNA), DNA-ploidy and depth of myometrial invasion (the so-called ECPI-1 score) overshadowed the value of all other features investigated. The present study was set up to evaluate further and compare the prognostic power of the ECPI-1 score in 77 FIGO I patients with long follow-up (10-15 years). Grade (revised), invasion depth, MSNA and ploidy were all highly significant. However, the ECPI-1 score (with exactly the same threshold as in the previous study, 0.87) greatly exceeded the prognostic value of these single features. Only two (3%) of the 64 patients with ECPI-1 0.87 (10 died within 42 months) (P < 0.0001, Mantel-Cox value = 51.1). These results confirm the prognostic strength of the ECPI-1 score in stage I endometrial carcinoma.

Changes in the distribution of synapses during growth: a quantitative morphological study of the neuromuscular system of fishes.

The distribution of synaptic sites on multiply innervated muscle fibres was analysed in four teleost fish species (zebrafish, trout, goldfish and stickleback), using acetylcholinesterase histochemistry. Fishes were chosen for this study rather than other vertebrates because of their long period of growth and continuous increase of muscle fibre size. We found that length and diameter of the fibres increase linearly with fish length but that the distance between synaptic sites increases only as the square root of the fish length and of muscle fibre size. This is explained functionally in connection with the increase of the space constant of a muscle fibre that is expected to accompany the increase of its diameter. We suggest that the change in the synaptic distribution is caused by factors associated with the increasingly wider spread of postsynaptic potentials along the growing fibres, as the intersynaptic distance was found to correlate more strongly with fibre size than with other factors, such as age, speed of growth and genetical background.