[Flow-cytometric study of aneuploidy and proliferative activity of colonic cancer cells].

Flow cytometry was employed to assess DNA level and proliferative activity of cells involved in 49 cancers of the large bowel epithelium. Also, 17 samples were taken from subjects without tumor pathology of the gastro-intestinal tract. Fifty-five percent of adenocarcinomas had aneuploidy (63%) in which cases over a half of cells revealed abnormal DNA levels. While aneuploidy was identified in one-third of cancer patients, similar cells were observed in the microscopically-unaltered epithelium at a varying distance from tumor, the intact intestinal epithelium being invariably diploid. The proliferative activity of colonic adenocarcinoma was shown to be significantly higher than that in rectal tumor and intact epithelium.