Proliferative activity of microvascular cells in glioblastomas does not correlate with time to recurrence.

The time to recurrence operation (TR) is a good growth parameter, in particular for glioblastomas. Recently, we have shown that Ki-67 labeling index (LI) of tumor cells has a high inverse correlation with this time interval. In the current study, the LI of microvascular cells (MVC) was examined in the same glioblastoma cases. The LI of MVC of primary and recurrent tumors had no relationship and did not show any correlation to TR. The growth fraction of MVC was significantly lower than that of tumor cells. The MVC in glioblastomas seems to have chaotical proliferation properties without any link to the tumor growth potential. This observation may have implications for anti-angiogenic therapy.