The CancerWeb Report, What's New In Cancer: February, 1996
Colorectal Cancer

• Number of blood vessels as indicator of response? - A group from the University of Uppsala in Sweden, used three different markers for immunohistochemical identification of microscopic blood vessels in colon tumors; the anti-von Willebrand factor (anti- vWF) was the most useful, and was used for most of the study. Patients with more than 10 anti-vWF-labeled microvessels per 4 square mm area had a significantly longer survival time than those with five or less, and those with between six and ten were intermediate. The number of positive microvessels did not correlate with tumor staging by the Dukes' system or histological classification on the basis of differentiation. Colon cancer is the opposite of other tumors in regard to blood vessel numbers; see under this month's neuroblastoma heading. (Lindmark, J Clin Oncol 14:461, 1996)