The malignancy grading method is not a reliable assessment of malignancy in mesothelioma

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Abstract
The ploidy of a series of pleural lesions–reactive proliferations, malignant mesotheliomas and metastatic tumours– was measured on a Leitz Miamed DNA image analyser using Feulgen‐stained slides. The technique successfully recognized all the metastatic tumours as malignant; this corresponds to previous work. However, it was not successful in classifying mesothelial lesions as benign or malignant, resulting in a very high false‐negative rate and a moderately high false‐positive rate. Mesothelial lesions appear to have a wide range of ploidy values irrespective of their biological behaviour. Thus, for primary mesothelial tumours, the ploidy value cannot be used as a reliable diagnostic index.