Measurement of the minimum apparent diffusion coefficient (ADCmin) of the primary tumor and CA125 are predictive of disease recurrence for patients with endometrial cancer.

OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study was to evaluate whether preoperative measurements of the minimum apparent diffusion coefficient (ADCmin) on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and the tumor marker CA125 are correlated with the clinical characteristics and prognosis of patients with endometrial cancer.

METHODS: The distribution of cases that scored positive for each of the biological parameters examined and the correlations with the ADCmin of the primary tumor and the serum tumor marker CA125 were examined for 111 patients with preoperative assessment of primary endometrial cancer.

RESULTS: There were significant correlations between the ADCmin of the primary tumor and the FIGO stage (P=0.001), depth of myometrial invasion (P<0.001), cervical involvement (P=0.003), lymph node metastasis (P=0.027), ovarian metastasis (P<0.001), peritoneal cytology (P=0.027) and tumor maximum size (P<0.001). The disease-free survival (DFS) rate of patients with high serum CA125 was significantly lower than that of patients with low serum CA125 (P=0.0395). The DFS rate of patients with a low ADCmin of the primary tumor was significantly lower than that of patients with a high ADCmin of the primary tumor (P<0.001). In particular, the ADCmin of the primary tumor was an independent factor for disease recurrence in a multivariate analysis (P=0.019).

CONCLUSIONS: The present findings indicate that a low preoperative ADCmin of the primary tumor is an important predictive factor for identifying endometrial cancer patients with a risk of disease recurrence.