Objective:

To investigate the likelihood of the detection of the necessity of staging preoperatively with the use of clinical parameters and frozen/section (FS).

Material and Methods:

219 patients were included who were operated on between 1996 and 2010 with a diagnosis of grade 1 endometrioid adenocarcinoma in probe curettage.

Results:

Among the clinical characteristics, only age and body mass index (BMI) predicted staging preoperatively. The probability of staging increased as age increased and BMI decreased. The concordance between preoperative diagnosis and FS was 89.5%. The diagnosis was upgraded at postoperative evaluation for 13 patients (5.9%), and downgraded for 2 patients (0.9%) compared with FS. The wrong diagnosis regarding grade, the depth of myometrial invasion DMI, tumour type and cervical invasion in FS was clinically significant and affected the decision of staging in 10 patients. In conclusion, only 7 patients (3.2%) who acquired staging surgery were missed in FS.

Conclusion:

It was shown that preoperative clinical parameters could not effectively predict the patients who should be staged. FS predicted the lymphatic involvement with high accuracy. The patient with a preoperative diagnosis of grade 1 endometrium cancer should be operated upon in centres where FS is utilised and oncologic staging surgery can be performed.

Keywords: Endometrial cancer, body mass index, age, frozen/section, staging