Prediction of survival by thymidine labelling index in patients with resistant ovarian carcinoma

The relationship between tumour proliferative activity, evaluated by thymidine labelling index (TLI), clinicopathological variables and clinical outcome, was analysed in a series of 64 chemotherapy-resistant, ovarian cancer patients. The median TLI of 4.6% (range 0.01-45.7) was used as the cut-off to discriminate rapidly from slowly proliferating tumours. Univariate analyses showed a significant advantage in survival for patients with TLI ≤ 4.6 (P = 0.0004), ECOG performance status ≤ 1 (P = 0.0001) and residual disease after primary surgery ≤ 2 cm (P = 0.019). Multivariate analysis demonstrated that performance status was the only independent prognostic variable, although TLI was the last covariate removed from the Cox's regression model.