| Description: |
We evaluated the association of spontaneous apoptosis and an apoptosis/proliferation index with survival to determine the potential of such measures to serve as pre-dictive markers for patients with glioblastoma multiforme (GBM). We examined the extent of spontaneous apopto-sis in tumors from newly diagnosed patients, 75 with GBM and 21 with anaplastic astrocytoma, who were entered on treatment protocols of the North Central Can-cer Treatment Group. In the group of GBM patients, those with a higher apoptotic index tended to live longer (P = 0.04; Cox proportional hazards model including per-formance score, age, and extent of resection in a multi-variate model). We found that the apoptotic index values for anaplastic astrocytoma patients tended to be lower than those in the GBM patients, although with small sam-ple sizes, the result was not statistically signicant Prognostic signicance of an apoptotic index and apoptosis/proliferation ratio for patients with high-grade astrocytomas1 |