EL EXUDADO PLEURAL MALIGNO: VALOR DIAGNOSTICO DEL ANALlSIS CITOGENETICO

Abstract

The metastatic pleural effusion may be the only evidence of pleuro-pulmonar malignancy. As it is always considered to be of bad prognosis, it is important to rule out the neoptastic nature of any suspicious pleural effusion. In order to do it, we studied 20 patients having PE either associated to malignancy (16 out of 20) or to Tuberculosis (4 out of 20). Every single sample of pleural fluid underwent to cytogenetic analysis in addition to biopsy and/or cytology. The absolute frequencies for malignancy and no-malignancy were analized according to the bayesian methodology. In our stuoy, we showed an important increase ot sensitivity fot he set biopsy-cytology by adding cytogenetical analysis (from 65 to 94%) without rising the total number of false positives. Besides, we found out cytogenetical abnormalities very similar to those described in the literature. We think that this method may be included in the work up for any pleural effusion whose assessment by cytologycal and/or histological means is doubtful.