Tumor Spreading to the Contralateral Ovary in Bilateral Ovarian Carcinoma Is a Late Event in Clonal Evolution

Abstract EN

Cancer of the ovary is bilateral in 25%.

Cytogenetic analysis could determine whether the disease in bilateral cases is metastatic or two separately occurring primary tumors, but karyotypic information comparing the two cancerous ovaries is limited to a single report with 11 informative cases.

We present a series of 32 bilateral ovarian carcinoma cases, analyzed by karyotyping and high-resolution CGH.

Our karyotypic findings showed that spreading to the contralateral ovary had occurred in bilateral ovarian cancer cases and that it was a late event in the clonal evolution of the tumors.

This was confirmed by the large number of similar changes detected by HR-CGH in the different lesions from the same patient.

The chromosomal bands most frequently involved in structural rearrangements were 19p13 (n=12) and 19q13 (n=11).

The chromosomal bands most frequently gained by both tumorous ovaries were 5p14 (70%), 8q23-24 (65%), 1q23-24 (57%), and 12p12 (48%), whereas the most frequently lost bands were 17p11 (78%), 17p13 (74%), 17p12 (70%), 22q13 (61%), 8p21 and 19q13 (52%), and 8p22-23 (48%).

This is the first time that 5p14 is seen gained at such a high frequency in cancer of the ovary; possibly oncogene(s) involved in bilateral ovarian carcinogenesis or tumor progression may reside in this band.