Comparação entre parâmetros morfológicos e morfométricos do testículohumano após diferentes processamentos histológicos

Abstract

The classical studies on human spermatogenesis were developed in the 1960's where the testes were preserved with coagulants fixatives and embedded in paraffin, producing thick sections and tissue with low-resolution. Currently, related studies are being developed with the use of fixatives that best preserve the tissue structure and cytology and embedded in plastic resins, such as glycol methacrylate and epoxyresins, which provide obtaining semithin histological sections. However, it is unclear whether it would be possible to compare the morphological and morphometric results of current studies with those published in the past , taking into account the discrepancy between histological processing. Thus, this study aims to compare morphological andmorphometric results (histopathological scores, tubular parameters, nuclear diameters, number of germ cells, somatic, mitosis and apoptosis and rates of the spermatogenesis efficiency) of the testis of men undergoing different treatments. After bilateral subcapsular orchiectomy, the testicle from five elderly men with prostate cancer weredivided into three parts and processed with (i) Bouin/paraffin, (ii) glutaraldehyde/glycol methacrylate and (iii) glutaraldehyde/araldite. The present study confirms that histological processing have remarkable interference in tissue morphology and especially the cytological definition. Together, the findings obtained here show that processing with glutaraldehyde fixation and inclusion in plastic resins can be comparedbased on morphometric data, and for the morphology, except for evaluation of spermatogonial biology, which are only reliable after processing with glutaraldehyde/araldite. On the other hand, when in Bouin/paraffin, these morphometric correlations, and even morphological data, cannot be made directly mainly due to the high degree of tissue retraction. It was found, moreover, that the morphometric data oncell number did not differ between the various processes, since the cells were identified, even with loss of morphological quality. On the other hand, when the findings relative to measurements (m) were compared, as tubular and cellular diameter and seminiferous epithelium height, the differences were significantly reduced demonstrating that tissue shrinkage affected the morphometric results, making it impossible to compare the results of different processing without the use of correctionfactors.