Steroid Receptors

To the Editor.—We write to support Kiang and Kennedy (238:32, 1977) on the usefulness of estrogen receptor analyses in the differential diagnosis of adenocarcinomas of unknown origin in female patients and want to report our finding on combined analyses for estrogen and progesterone binding in 14 ovarian tumors over the past two years.Data from seven tumors illustrate the usefulness with this application of receptor analyses. Of three lung tumors in patients with prior histories of genital tract tumors, one of the lesions could be established as metastatic endometrial carcinoma, and another was established as metastatic ovarian disease because of the presence of high-affinity, low-capacity estrogen binding in the cytosol; in the third, the absence of detectable estrogen binding helped to verify primary lung cancer. None of three Krukenberg tumors exhibited high-affinity, low-capacity binding for estrogen or progesterone, thereby indicating them to be more likely from the gastrointestinal tract