| Latest
article(abstracts):
Intratumoural
lymphatics in benign and malignant soft tissue tumours.Virchows
Arch. 2008 Sep 24.
Soft tissue
sarcomas do not generally metastasise via lymphatics, and the
presence or absence of lymphatic vessels within sarcomas and
benign soft tissue tumours is not known. In this study, we
determined whether lymphatic vessels were present in a wide
range of benign and malignant soft tissue lesions by examining
intratumoural expression of the lymphatic endothelial cell
markers, Lyve-1 and podoplanin. Intratumoural Lyve-1+/podoplanin+
lymphatics were not identified in sarcomas apart from all cases
of epithelioid sarcoma (a tumour which is known to metastasise
to lymph nodes) and a few cases of leiomyosarcoma,
rhabdomyosarcoma and synovial sarcoma. Intratumoural lymphatics
were also absent in most benign soft tissue tumours. Reparative
and inflammatory soft tissue lesions contained lymphatics, as
did all (pseudosarcomatous) proliferative myofibroblastic
lesions including nodular, proliferative and ischaemic fasciitis,
elastofibroma, nuchal fibroma and deep fibromatosis. Our results
show that most soft tissue sarcomas do not contain intratumoural
lymphatics, a finding which is consistent with the infrequent
finding of sarcoma metastasis to lymph nodes. In contrast to
fibrosarcoma and a number of other malignant spindle cell
tumours, proliferative fibroblastic/myofibroblastic lesions of
soft tissue contain intralesional lymphatic vessels. |
