Is there a way to differentiate between synchronous tumors and metastases?

[sunealoneal]

I'm doing a case report about a patient with two synchronous tumors. One of that patient's physicians said that the path report indicated that one of tumors couldn't have been a metastasis of the other due to differing cell surface markers.

I then came across this tonight which suggests that a metastasis could have a different phenotype from the original tumor. Is that typically the case? I'm going into the practice tomorrow or the day after depending on the availability of the physicians, but if anyone has any insight about this, it'd be great. Thanks!

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[gutonc]

The answer is yes. The second answer is that it probably doesn't matter.

 

[sunealoneal]

Haha, sounds good. It'd only amount to a sentence of my report anyway.