Micronucleus in Cervical Intraepithelial Lesions and Carcinoma

Aims and Objectives To score and compare micronucleus (MN) in the whole spectrum of cervical lesions including normal, inflammatory, abnormal squamous cell of undetermined significance (ASC-US), low-grade squamous intraepithelial lesion (LSIL), high-grade squamous intraepithelial lesion (HSIL) and invasive cancer (IC) and to evaluate the role of MN as a biomarker in different pre-neoplastic and neoplastic lesions Materials and Methods A total of 224 slides, comprised of normal (40), inflammatory (40), ASC-US (30), LSIL (38), HSIL (30) and IC (46), were studied All the cases of HSIL, IC and ASC-US had histopathology The LSIL, normal and inflammatory smears were again reviewed by 2 experienced cytopathologists independently Two observers separately and independently counted the number of micronucleated cells per 1,000 of epithelial cells in oil immersion magnification (x100 objective) which was expressed as MN score per 1,000 cells Results The mean MN scores +/- SD in normal, inflammatory, ASC-US, LSIL, HSIL and IC cases of cervical lesions were 1 02 +/- 1 59, 0 4250 +/- 0 71208,2 87 +/- 2 21, 4 7368 +/- 562179, 21 30 +/- 1718 and 18 50 +/- 954, respectively MN scores of IC and HSIL were significantly high compared to the normal (p<0 000), the inflammatory (p<0 000), the ASC-US (p<0 000) and to the LSIL (p<0 000) group (analysis of variance test) LSIL showed significant difference with the normal (p = 0 043), the inflammatory (p = 0 019), the HSIL (p<0 000) and the IC (p<0000) group but not with the ASC-US (p = 0 342) group Conclusions MN scoring on the epithelial cells of cervix could be used as a biomarker in cancer screening This is an easy, simple, reliable, reproducible and objective test which can be performed on routinely stained smears copyright (C) 2010 S Karger AG Basel