Biological and clinical implication of cellular DNA content in renal cell carcinomas.

DNA flow cytometric analysis (FCM) was performed on surgical bioptic samples taken from 82 renal cell carcinomas. FCM has evidenced that 35% (29/82) of renal carcinomas resulted diploid, 65% (53/82) aneuploid and of the latter 22% (12/53) multiclonal. Our results do not indicate any relationship among cytometric ploidy, Fuhrman grading, Robson and pTNM staging. A possible interesting increase of aneuploidy frequency was observed between the NMV (66%) subgroup and the no zero NMV (90%) subgroup, while in diploid patients these values were 40% and 10%, respectively. Follow-up data evidence a significant difference in survival pattern of patients between diploid and aneuploid groups. In conclusion, our results show that cytometric ploidy is a potential important prognostic parameter in survival term.