血清中胱蛋白C(cystatin C)與惡性腫瘤之臨床相關

Abstract

Objective: Pathological studies have been documented that cysteine protease inhibitors play a pivotal role in tumor cell invasion and metastasis. Cystatin C is considered to be the most important extracellular cysteine protease inhibitor and can be found in all body fluids. The specific aim of the present study is to investigate whether serum cystatin C levels have diagnostic and/or prognostic values in malignant diseases. In this study, we recruited a total of 124 patients with various kinds of malignant tumors including breast, colon, esophageal, gastric, hepatocellular, lung and nasopharyngeal cancers from Lo-Tung Poh-Ai hospital and 68 healthy normal subjects to serve as controls. After signing of informed consent, blood specimens were collected and serum cystatin C levels were measured by nephelometric method. Using the continual relevant analysis between kidney dysfunction makers and the levels of serum cystain C, 34 patients with colon cancers were first rejected to avoid the influence of kidney dysfunction. We found that the levels of serum cystatin C were significantly elevated in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma irrespective of gender. Levels of serum cystatin C in sera of patients with esophageal , lung and nasopharyngeal cancers were shown to be elevated only in the male population. Interestingly, serum cystatin C levels in patients with breast and gastric cancers were shown to be comparable to the healthy controls. Collectively, our results suggest that serum cystatin C may serve as an adjunct diagnostic and/or prognostic indicator along with other tumor markers for the assessment of cancer progression.