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Lymphatic Vessels in the Human Endometrium: Are they Present or Absent?
Tatsuo Tomita* and Kuni Mah
Departments of Integrative Bioscience and Pathology, Oregon Health and Science University, Portland, USA
- *Corresponding Author:
- Tomita T
Oregon Health and Science University
USA
FAX: 5034948918
Tel: 5036465747
E-mail: tomitat@ohsu.edu
Received date: June 16, 2015 Accepted date: July 20, 2015 Published date: July 23, 2015
Citation:Tomita T, Mah K (2015) Lymphatic Vessels in the Human Endometrium: Are they Present or Absent?. J Clin Exp Pathol 5:241. doi: 10.4172/2161-0681.1000241
Copyright: ©2015 Tomita T, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
The presence and structure-function relationship of lymphatic vessels in the human endometrium are still sketchy and unsettled: some authors claimed that there were no lymphatic vessels [1,2] but more reports agreed that lymphatic vessels are present in the human endometrium, especially in the basalis but may not be in the functionalis [3-6]. Recently more reliable Immunocytochemical markers for lymphatic vessels became available and have been widely utilized using D2-40 [7] and lymphatic epithelial hyaluronan receptor-1 (LYVE-1) [8]. D2-40 recognizes the collecting lymphatic vessels and LYVE-1 recognizes mainly lymphatic capillaries [9]. With routinely formalin-fixed and paraffin-embedded sections, not all lymphatic sections are immunostained but frozen sections provide consistently much more lymphatic and venous vessels. There are numerous lymphatic vessels in the myometrium and basalis in all menstrual phases. In the Day 3 endometrium from the menstrual period, there were numerous small lymphatic vessels in the remaining basalis by both D2-40 and LYVE-1. There are cyclic changes of lymphatic vessels in the functionalis: The early proliferative phase endometrium, Day 5 showed very few, small lymphatic vessels in the lower functionalis (Figure 1) and Day 9 endometrium revealed few lymphatic vessels in the upper endometrium.
