Lymph node metastasis in a gynecologic malignancy.

A radical hysterectomy was performed on patients with stage IA2 to IIB cervical cancer. For these patients, many histopathological parameters have been reported to be prognostic factors of cervical cancer, such as a pelvic lymph node (PLN) metastasis, the histological subtype, the tumor diameter, the depth of the stromal invasion, a lymph-vascular space invasion (LVSI), a parametrial invasion, a corpus invasion and a vaginal invasion. Ovarian cancer is normally treated with cytoreductive surgery followed by chemotherapy. Although physicians have paid a great deal of attention to intraperitoneal disease, a substantial number of ovarian cancers have reported to involve the retroperitoneal lymph nodes. Therefore, a lymph node metastasis has been introduced into FIGO staging. However, the prognostic significance of a lymph node metastasis is controversial. In order to determine the possibility of individualizing a pelvic lymph node (PLN) dissection in patients with endometrial cancer, the relationship between PLN metastasis and the various prognostic factors was investigated. In this paper, various prognostic variables including a lymph node metastasis were analyzed in cervical cancer, endometrial cancer, and ovarian cancer.