The value of sentinel lymphadenectomy in radical operative treatment of cervical cancer.

Background/aim: Therapy of the early stages of cervical carcinoma is surgical or radiation therapy, and for advanced stages chemoradiotherapy. Pelvic and paraaortic lymphadenectomy in early stages offers the most important prognostic factor for survival. To evaluate the method and possible influence on surgical and therapy of the disease, we performed sentinel node (SN) identification and excision during open radical hysterectomy and lymphadenectomy in stage Ib-IIa cervical carcinoma.

Methods: Fifty patients initially diagnosed with invasive squamous-cell cervical cancer stage Ib-IIa were included in the study. Only blue dye was used for sentinel node mapping. During the surgery sentinel nodes were identified and sent to histopathology separately from the other lymph nodes. After lymphadenectomy, radical hysterectomy was performed.

Results: The mean age of our fifty patients was 49.10 years (SD = 5.92), and the mean number of extracted lymph nodes per patient was 25.78 (SD = 5.58). The number of sentinel nodes identified per patient was between 0 and 5, mean 2.60 (SD = 1.54). There were no inframesenteric paraaortic sentinel nodes found among the patients. The dominant tumor grades were 1 and 2, 40% and 50% respectively, and 37 out of 50 patients (74%) had tumor diameter less than 2 cm. In four patients (8%) SN were not identified. In the rest of 46 patients the presence of SN was bilateral (19 patients, 38%) or unilateral (27 patients, 54%). Positive SN were found in 17 patients (34%), and negative in 29 patients (58%). Out of the whole group of patients (50), 21 of them (42%) had positive lymph nodes (LN). In the crosstab statistics, no differences were noticed in the group without SN found, in comparison with tumor grade and diameter. Finally, our test showed sensitivity of 85% (SE = 8%), specificity 100%, positive predictive value of 100%, negative predictive value of 89.6% (SE = 5.60%), and effectiveness of 93% (SE = 3.6%) regarding sentinel lymphadenectomy.

Conclusion: This method of sentinel lymph node identification is simple, but not reliable enough to support further laparoscopic SN excision in order to make the final decision about the treatment of cervical cancer.