Impact of using elastic stains for detection of venous invasion in the prognosis of patients with lymph node negative colorectal cancer

摘要

Purpose and methods Patients with nodal negative colorectal cancer (CRC) suffer recurrent or metastatic disease in 40% of cases after surgical resection. To investigate a potential prognostic impact of vascular tumor infiltration, we retrospectively analyzed 185 nodal negative stage I and II CRC specimens for the presence of intra- and/or extramural venous invasion (V1_IM/V1_EM) using elastic stains of all tumor sections and correlated our findings with the clinical follow-up.