Abstract
Immunoreactivity of gastrointestinal cancer‐associated antigen (GICA) was studied in tissue sections of 311 colorectal cancer patients and the results were correlated with data on patient survival. The group of uniformly GICA‐positive tumours (10.6%) tended to behave more aggressively than focally positive (53.4%) and GICA‐negative tumours (36.0%), also when stratified for stage of tumour extension and histological grade. This trend, however, did not reach statistical significance, perhaps as the result of a bias introduced by the relatively small number of GICA‐positive cases. There appeared to be no significant difference in clinical course between patients with GICA focally positive or GICA‐negative tumours (together comprising 89.4% of the total population studied). Further studies including a larger number of patients and longer follow‐up periods are needed to validate the suggestion that GICA‐positive colorectal carcinomas might show a more aggressive behaviour than tumours displaying other modes of GICA expression. However, the results of our study suggest that GICA immunoreactivity in colorectal carcinoma tissue is unlikely to be a sensitive, independent parameter for the prediction of prognosis in individual patients.