Frequency of apoptosis relates inversely to invasiveness and metastatic activity in human colorectal cancer

The frequency of apoptosis was determined in 102 cases of human colorectal cancer. The results were correlated with the frequency of cell proliferation and with clinicopathological characteristics such as degree of differentiation, invasiveness and metastasis. As a marker of apoptosis, intranuclear DNA strand breaks were localized with in situ nick translation (ISNT). As a marker of proliferation, proliferating cell nuclear antigen (PCNA) was localized immunohistochemically. The numbers of nuclei positive with ISNT and for PCNA per 1,000 nuclei on tissue sections were obtained. The labelling indices were compared with clinicopathological characteristics for each tumour. The ISNT labelling index of well differentiated colon carcinomas was higher than that of poorly differentiated carcinomas. Among similarly differetiated cancers, ISNT L.I. of colon carcinomas classified as Dukes A was higher than Dukes B/C, and L.I. of carcinomas which did not metastasize to lymph node or liver was higher than that of carcinomas which metastasized. The PCNA labelling index did not correlate with any of the clinicopathological characteristics or with the ISNT labelling index. The data suggest that apoptosis indices severe as a marker of tumour progression.