Sentinel lymph node biopsy is not accurate in predicting lymph node status for patients with cervical carcinoma

BACKGROUND: The authors evaluated the accuracy of sentinel lymph node biopsy in predicting lymph node status for patients with early cervical carcinoma. In particular, the authors set out to determine the false-negative rate associated with sentinel lymph node biopsy in this setting. METHODS: Twenty-nine consecutive patients with early cervical carcinoma who were treated with pelvic laparoscopic lymphadenectomy and radical surgery underwent sentinel lymph node biopsy following lymphatic mapping with patent blue dye. All sentinel and nonsentinel lymph nodes were evaluated for micrometastases via multilevel sectioning followed by immunohistochemical staining. RESULTS: At least one sentinel lymph node was identified for each patient. On routine pathologic evaluation, 3 patients (10%) were found to have positive lymph nodes. Among the remaining 26 patients, multilevel sectioning in conjunction with immunohistochemical analysis identified 5 patients (19%) who had micrometastases in the pelvic lymph nodes. Two of these five patients had micrometastases in a sentinel lymph node; however, the more notable finding was that the other three patients had micrometastases in nonsentinel pelvic lymph nodes despite having negative findings on sentinel lymph node biopsy. Thus, the negative predictive value of sentinel lymph node biopsy in the current study was 87.5%. CONCLUSIONS: Multilevel sectioning followed by cytokeratin immunohistochemistry may identify additional patients who have lymph node micrometastases; in the current study, this technique identified cases in which micrometastases were present in nonsentinel lymph nodes even when sentinel lymph nodes were found to be negative for disease on biopsy. This high false-negative rate associated with sentinel lymph node biopsy, raises questions regarding the validity of the sentinel lymph node concept in cervical carcinoma.