Lateral transcondylar approach for tumors at the anterior aspect of the craniovertebral junction.

Background: Tumors at the craniovertebral junction are difficult to remove because of their location and complex anatomic relations. The lateral transcondylar approach is a versatile approach to this area and allows access to a variety of intra- and extradural tumors. The lateral transcondylar approach has been used for a series of chordomas in this location.

Clival chordomas: clinical management, results, and complications in 71 patients.

Object: Chordomas are rare malignant neoplasms arising predominantly at the sacrum and skull base. They are uniformly lethal unless treated with aggressive resection and proton beam irradiation. The authors present results of the surgical management of a large number of patients with clivus chordomas.

Surgical management of chordomas of the cervical spine.

Object: Chordomas of the cervical spine are rare tumors. Although en bloc resection has proven to be the ideal procedure in other areas, there is controversy regarding this approach in the cervical spine. The goal in this study was to determine whether piecemeal tumor resection was efficient in the management of chordomas that arise in this location.

N-cadherin expression in breast cancer: correlation with an aggressive histologic variant--invasive micropapillary carcinoma.

Upregulation of N-cadherin in epithelial tumor cells has been shown to contribute to the invasive/metastatic phenotype. It remains however to be determined whether N-cadherin is increased in human breast cancers with enhanced malignant potential. We examined a large number of invasive breast cancer specimens (n = 114) for N- and E-cadherin.

Cadherins and catenins in clival chordomas: correlation of expression with tumor aggressiveness.

The local invasiveness and occasional rapid growth of chordomas, despite optimal treatment, highlight the need to develop ways to predict their biologic behavior. Alterations in adhesion proteins have been shown to participate in proliferation, invasiveness, and metastasis in epithelial tumors. We therefore analyzed the expression of E-cadherin, N-cadherin, as well as their cytosolic binding proteins alpha-catenin, beta-catenin, and gamma-catenin, in 51 paraffin archived and 17 cryopreserved chordoma specimens.