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. 2010 Jul 14;2(3):1513–1527. doi: 10.3390/cancers2031513

Figure 1.

Figure 1

Neural invasion (NI) in pancreatic cancer (PCa) and pancreatic neuroplasticity are interlinked phenomena. NI is encountered in nearly all cases of ductal adenocarcinoma of the pancreas either within or adjacent to the main tumor mass (top panel). Histopathologic examination of the pancreatic tumor together with peripancreatic areas demonstrates a drastically increased number and size of intrapancreatic nerves (middle panel, 25× magnified, nerves were immunohistochemically/brown-labeled with the pan-neuronal marker protein gene product 9.5/PGP9.5). A closer look at these hypertrophic nerves reveals a high frequency of NI, even in the endoneural space (lower panel; 200x magnification, cancer cells correspond to the hematoxylin-counterstained areas within the brown-PGP9.5-immunostained nerve).