Apoptosis and its relationship with cell proliferation, p53, Waf1p21, bcl-2 and c-myc in esophageal carcinogenesis studied with a high-risk population in northern China

Table 1 Apoptosis and cell proliferation in esophageal epithelia with different severities of lesions

Histology	Apoptosis					PCNA immunostaining
	Number of samples examined	Percent of samples with apoptosis	Apoptotic indexa (mean ± SD)			Number of samples examined	Number of positive ells/mm2 (mean ± SD)
			AI	ACI	ABI
Normal	38	24	0.3 ± 0.7	0.2 ± 0.5	0.1 ± 0.4	31	200 ± 113
BCH	156	32	0.6 ± 0.9	0.3 ± 0.6b	0.2 ± 0.5	106	286 ± 150b
DYS	47	79c	1.8 ± 1.5b	0.9 ± 0.9b	0.8 ± 1.0b	31	719 ± 389b
SCC	38	100c	2.5 ± 2.1b	0.9 ± 0.9	1.6 ± 1.5b	26	1 261 ± 45b

^aACI, the number of apoptotic cells per mm²; ABI, the number of apoptotic bodies per mm²; AI, the number of both apoptotic cells and apoptotic bodies per mm².

^bStatistically different from the adjacent low-grade lesion by Wilcoxon rank-sum test,

^cP< 0.01.