Molecular sputum analysis for the diagnosis of lung cancer

Abstract

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer mortality rate worldwide, mainly because of the presence of metastatic disease at the time of diagnosis. Early detection of lung cancer improves prognosis, and towards this end, large screening trials in high-risk individuals have been conducted since the past century. Despite all efforts, the need for novel (complementary) lung cancer diagnostic and screening methods still exists. In this review, we focus on the assessment of lung cancer-related biomarkers in sputum in the past decennium. Besides cytology, mutation and microRNA analysis, special attention has been paid to DNA promoter hypermethylation, of which all available literature is summarised without time restriction. A model is proposed to aid in the distinction between diagnostic and risk markers. Research on the use of sputum for non-invasive detection of early-stage lung cancer has brought new insights and advanced molecular techniques. The sputum shows a promising potential for routine diagnostic and possibly screening purposes.

Aberrant Methylation of Genes in Sputum Samples as Diagnostic Biomarkers for Non-small Cell Lung Cancer: a Meta-analysis

“…Twelve of these studies (Destro et al, 2004;Konno et al, 2004;Belinsky et al, 2005;Olaussen et al, 2005;Georgiou et al, 2007;Shivapurkar et al, 2007;Liu et al, 2008;Vander et al, 2008;Hu et al, 2009;Kand et al, 2011Hwang et al, 2011Hubers et al, 2013) had QUADAS score ≥ 8, six (Wang et al, 2004;Zhang et al, 2004;Cirincione et al, 2006;Hus et al, 2007;Cao et al, 2008;Sun et al, 2013) had QUADAS score =7 and four (Wang et al, 2006;Guo et al, 2008;Peng et al, 2010;Zhang et al, 2012) had a QUADAS score ≤ 6.…”

“…The systematic literature search yielded a total of 22 studies including a total of 1208 patients and 1200 controls for final analysis (Destro et al, 2004;Zhang et al, 2004;Konno et al, 2004;Wang et al, 2004;Belinsky et al, 2005;Olaussen et 2007; Shivapurkar et al, 2007;Liu et al, 2008;Van der Drift et al, 2008;Guo et al, 2008;Cao et al, 2008;Hu et al, 2009;Peng et al, 2010;Kang et al, 2011;Hwang et al, 2011;Zhang et al, 2012;Hubers et al, 2013;Sun et al, 2013) (Figure 1). The baseline characteristics of the included studies were presented in Table 1.…”

“…During the past years, an increasing number of researches had been published utilizing aberrant methylation of sputum DNA as diagnostic biomarkers for NSCLC (Georgios et al, 2012;Skin et al, 2012;Hubers et al, 2013). However, the results of these studies were variable and inconsistent.…”

Sample types applied for molecular diagnosis of therapeutic management of advanced non-small cell lung cancer in the precision medicine

“…These are easier to be obtained from patients with advanced NSCLCs who experience poor health conditions. Researches on using sputum for noninvasive detections of early stage lung cancers have showed a promising future for routine diagnoses and potential for screening [44].…”

Combined Application of Phosphoinositide 3-Kinase and Mammalian Target of Rapamycin Inhibitors Suppresses Cell Growth and Promotes Apoptosis in Human Lung Cancer Cell Lines

“…Lung cancer has been the leading cause of malignancyrelated death (1). Over the past years, lung cancer treatment has based on cytotoxic agents and despite significant progress, survival rates for advanced lung cancer remain low (2).…”