| Research Abstract |
During the period of past two years of this particular project, endocrine cell tumors of the gastrointestinal tract of Japanese were collected and analyzed.
1. Endocrine cell tumors of the gastrointestinal tract were divided into two groups : carcinoid tumor(CD), low-grade malignacy and endocrine cell carcinoma(ECC). high-grade malignancy. Histological differential diagnosis between these two entities wasestablished.
2. CD was suspected to be mainly derived from immature endocrine cells. ECC were hypothesized to derive from neoplastic endcrine cell in mucosal tubular adenocarcinoma, totipotential stem cell, CD, or immature endocrine cells. The first pathway was suspected to be most frequent, followed by the second.
3. New classification of carcinoid tumors according to different ocurring sites wasestablished. Japanese patients have characteristic and incidence of distribution different from that of Europeans and Americans.
4. Four cell lines were established from human esophageal, gastric and rectal ECC.They showed high levels of CK-BB (4 lines), low levels of aromatic L-amino-acid decarboxylase(2 lines) and NSE (3 lines), no amplification of C-myc, N-myc and L-myc (4lines) and expression of c-myc mRNA (2 lines).
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