Nerve Fiber Immunohistochemical Panel Discriminates between Nerve Sheath and Perivascular Wall Tumors

Benign and malignant nerve sheath tumors (NST) pose a major challenge in routine diagnostic anatomic pathology because of shared histomorphological features with other soft tissue tumors (STT). As a result, NST are often diagnosed as STT, a broad category that encompasses various entities including perivascular wall tumors (PWT), and that represents approximately 15% of all skin tumors in dogs. Immunohistochemistry (IHC) can assist the identification of histologic sub-types of STTs. This IHC pilot study applies various markers largely expressed by peripheral nerves to twelve benign and six malignant NST and determines the intratumoral protein expression of laminin, periaxin-1, Sox-10 and S-100, in the NSTs subtypes. Furthermore, this study assesses the usefulness of peripheral nerve markers applied on diagnostic work cases and demonstrates the relevance of laminin expression patterns, periaxin-1 and Sox-10, in assisting the differentiation of NST from other STT, in particular from PWT.