AIM:To evaluate the influence of various clinicopathologicfactors on survival of patients with bile duct carcinoma aftercurative resection.METHODS:A retrospective analysis was made for 86 casesof bile duct carcinoma treated from January 1981 toSeptember 1995.Fifteen clinicopathologic factors possiblyinfluencing survival were selected.Independent variableswere first analyzed by univariate methods.Survival forvariable was estimated by the method of Kaplan and Meier.The variables that were statistically significant by univariateanalysis were included in a multivariate analysis,which wereconfirmed using the Cox stepwise proportion hazard modelwith the help of SPSS 10.0 for Windows software.RESULTS:The overall cumulative survival rate was 72.6 %at 1 year,32.4% at 3 years,and 18.7% at 5 years.Theresults of univariate analysis showed that the majorsignificant prognostic factors influencing survival of thesepatients were histological type of lesion,lymph nodemetastasis,pancreatic invasion,duodenal invasion,perineuralinvasion,macroscopic vessel involvement,resected surgicalmargin and depth of cancer invasion(P=0.02,0.02,0.004,0.005,0.01,0.43,0.03 and 0.04).Age,sex,location of tumor,size of tumor,macroscopic type of lesions,hepaticmetastasis,and hepatic invasion were not significantlyassociated with prognosis(P>0.05).Pancreatic invasion,perineural invasion and lymph node metastases were thethree most important prognostic factors by multivariateanalysis using the Cox proportional hazards model.CONCLUSION: Pancreatic invasion, perineural invasion and lymph node metastases are the most important prognostic factors for bile duct carcinoma after curative resection. AIM: To evaluate the influence of various clinicopathologic factors on survival of patients with bile duct carcinoma after curative resection. METHHODS: A retrospective analysis was made for 86 cases of bile duct carcinoma treated from January 1981 to September 1995. Fifteen clinicopathologic factors possibly apoptosis seeking were selected.Independent variableswere first analyzed by univariate methods. Survival for variable was estimated by the method of Kaplan and Meier. The variables that were not significant by univariate analysis were included in a multivariate analysis, which wereconfirmed using the Cox stepwise proportion hazard modelwith the help of SPSS 10.0 for Windows software .RESULTS: The overall cumulative survival rate was 72.6% at 1 year, 32.4% at 3 years, and 18.7% at 5 years. The results of univariate analysis showed that the majorsignificant prognostic factors influencing survival of these patients were histological type of lesion, lymph nodemetastasis , pancreatic invasion, duod enal invasion, perineuralinvasion, macroscopic vessel involvement, resected surgicalmargin and depth of cancer invasion (Angels, sex, location of tumor, size of tumor, macroscopic type of lesions, hepaticmetastasis, and hepatic invasion were not significantly associated with prognosis (P> 0.05). Pancreatic invasion, perineural invasion and lymph node metastases were the three most important prognostic factors by multivariate analysis using the Cox proportional hazards model. CONCLUSION: Pancreatic invasion, perineural invasion and lymph node metastases are the most important prognostic factors for bile duct carcinoma after curative resection.