Comparison of histopathological and flow cytometric parameters in prediction of prognosis in gastric cancer.

Flow cytometric analysis was performed retrospectively on material from 76 patients having potentially curative resection for gastric carcinoma between 1968 and 1984. The prognostic significance of DNA aneuploidy was compared with that of conventional histological grading and staging of the tumour. The presence of DNA aneuploidy was associated with a significantly poorer prognosis when compared with diploid tumours (P less than 0.02), but was not found to be predictive of survival when the presence of lymph node metastases (P less than 0.0001) and resection margin involvement (P less than 0.003) were allowed for using multiple regression analysis. When intestinal and diffuse types of gastric carcinoma were analysed separately, DNA aneuploidy was associated with a significantly shorter survival only in patients with intestinal type tumours.