Affiliations: Service de Gynécologie Obstétrique Hôpital Arnaud de Villeneuve, France | Service Central de Physiologie Clinique, Centre d’Exploration et de Réadaptation des Anomalies du Métabolisme Musculaire (CERAMM), CHU Lapeyronie 34295, Montpellier‐cédex 5, France
Note: [] Correspondence to: Dr J.F. Brun, MD, Ph.D. Tel.: +33 467 338284; Fax: +33 467 335923; E‐mail: [email protected].
Abstract: In order to further characterize the alterations of erythrocyte aggregation described in ovarian cancer, we measured it with laser backscattering in eleven women suffering from ovarian cancer (mean age: 44.7 ± 3.6, extreme values: 28–61 yr) compared with thirteen matched control women. Blood rheology exhibited a wide variability in cancer patients, with some unusually high values of plasma viscosity and/or RBC aggregation in individual cases. The only significant differences were found for the RBC disaggregation threshold which was higher in patients than in controls (78.06 ± 10.14 vs 52.6 ± 3.15 s^{-1}, p<{}0.05), while hematocrit was lower (34.45 ± 1.42 vs 38.23 ± 0.75, p<{}0.05). A negative correlation between hematocrit and corrected blood viscosity on the whole sample of subjects (r={}0.454, p<{}0.05) indicates that hematocrit is decreased in subjects prone to high viscosity, resulting in similar values of apparent blood viscosity in controls and patients. Thus, a lower disaggregability of RBCs is evidenced in women with ovarian cancer, as well as a tendency to blood hyperviscosity compensated by a reduction of hematocrit which suggests that there may be some degree of ‘viscoregulation’.
