Endocrine Abstracts

Background: Angiogenesis are correlated with the aggressiveness, evolution’s rapidity and appearance of the locally advanced and metastatic medullary thyroid cancer (CMT), but in the same time is a selection criteria for actual therapy tested in the clinical studies.

Objective: Study of angiogenesis in patients diagnosticated with CMT.

Methods: Our study is conducted for 20 patients with sporadic and familial CMT, who are diagnosticated and surgically treated in our institute; we examine the angiogenesis by investigate the vascular growth factors – vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), vascular endothelial growth factor receptor – VEGFR3, epidermal growth factor receptor – EGFR and D2–40 – marker of lymphangiogenesis – in tumour tissue by immunohistochemistry.

Results: Nineteen patients presented VEGF positive in tumor. For these patients VEGFR3 was studied and the result was positive for 15 subjects. In this lot 6 patients have EGFR positive in tumor or vessels. Only 3 subjects have presented D2–40 positive in tumor, vessels or in tumor and vessels. We correlated these results with clinical data.

Conclusions: The vascular growth factors are correlated with the aggressiveness, evolution’s rapidity and appearance of the locally advanced and metastatic medullary thyroid cancer.

The study shows that the angiogenesis plays an important part in tumour’s growth and extension of the blood flow in the tumour, being considered an independent prognostic indicator. Focusing the research on blood vessels could represent a new perspective for medullary thyroid carcinoma. These are preliminary results from a more comprehensive study.