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Letters to the Editor |
1 Department of Obstetrics, and Gynecology, University of Tübingen, Calwerstrasse 7, 72070 Tübingen, Germany
aAuthor for correspondence. Fax 49-7071-295424; e-mail sven.becker@med.uni-tuebingen.de.
| The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below. |
To the Editor:
Despite histopathologic evidence of tumor-free margins, many breast cancer patients suffer from recurrence of their disease. This may reflect the presence of disseminated, premetastatic tumor cells at the time of initial diagnosis and therapy. The detection of disseminated tumor cells in bone marrow/blood has been associated with increased mortality in breast cancer patients (1). Reverse transcription-PCR (RT-PCR) for cytokeratin 19 (CK19) may be a useful alternative or complement to immunocytochemical detection (2). Unfortunately, results of RT-PCR studies vary widely. The reasons for this are conceptual as well as technical.
Because RNAses in samples can degrade RNA before analysis, we measured mRNA by RT-PCR in 15 sets of four samples each that were processed at different time points after collection and addition of
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