Clinical significance of molecular diagnosis of micrometastasis in lymph nodes, peripheral blood and bone marrow in the surgical treatment of patients with non-small cell lung cancer

Abstract

To explore the clinical significance of detecting micrometastasis in lymph node, peripheral blood and bone marrow from patients with lung cancer for selection of surgical indication and the correlation among them. The CK19 mRNA expression was detected in lymph nodes, peripheral blood and bone marrow from 29 lung cancer patients and 11 benign pulmonary lesion patients by nested RY-PCR. The sensitivity of RT-PCR technique was 10(-6) in this study. The positive rate of CK19 mRNA were 54. 5% ( 55/ 101) , 34. 5% ( 10/ 29) and 20. 7% ( 6/ 29) in lymph node, peripheral blood and bone marrow from lung cancer patients respectively, and a highly positive correlation existed among the three groups ( P < 0. 05) . The micrometastasis in peripheral blood and bone marrow were closely related to the pathological classification, cell differentiation of the cancer and P-TNM stage of the disease ( P < 0. 05 or P < 0. 01) . RT-PCR technique is a specific and sensitive method to detect micrometastasis in patients with lung cancer. The detection of CK19 mRNA might have important clinical significance in molecular diagnosis and surgical indication in patients with lung cancer.