The clinical significance and expression of serum IGF-I and IGFBP-3 in the colorectal cancer

Abstract

Objective To study the expression of insulin-like growth factor I(IGF-I )and insulin like growth factor binding protein -3(IGFBP-3)in the colorectal cancer and the relations between them. Methods A case-control study was conducted. We selected 113 patients with a pathologically conformed diagnostic colorectal cancer as the colorectal cancer (CRC) group, 37 patients with colorectal benign diseases as benign control (N-CRC) group, and other 76 healthy subjects as normal control (NC) group. CRC was divided into lymphatic metastasis (M-CRC) subgroup and no lymphatic metastasis (NM-CRC) subgroup and was also categorized by TNM staging. Concentrations of serum IGF-I and IGFBP-3 were measured by chemiluminescence method. SNK test and one-way ANOVA were used for comparison between the two groups and among multi-groups, respectively. Results A slightly decreasing trend of the concentrations of serum IGF-I was observed following the sequences of the NC, N-CRC and CRC groups. Moreover, the concentrations of serum IGF-I in T4 were significantly lower than that in(T1+ T2) and T3(F=6.279, P=0.003). The concentration of serum IGFBP-3 in the CRC group (3.13±1.57)μg/ml was significantly lower than that both in the N-CRC (3.42±1.32)μg/ml (F=3.04, P=0.09) and the Normal group (4.62± 1.10)μg/ml (F=10.88, P=0.001). The concentration of serum IGFBP-3 in the M-CRC was higher than that in NM-CRC(F=4.44, P<0.05). The ratio of IGF-I/IGFBP-3 in the CRC group (48.85±29.14) was remarkably higher than that both in the N-CRC group (42.38±12.58) (F=5.05, P=0.02) and the Normal group (42.46±16.24)(F=5.68, P=0.02). The value of diagnosis is general. The area under the ROC curve (AUC) of IGF-I was 0.63(95% CI 0.56-0.70), the sensitivity and specificity of IGF-I were 85.8% and 40.7% respectively when the critical value was 102.5 μg/ml.The area under the ROC curve (AUC) of IGFBP-3 was 0.72(95% CI 0.64-0.78), the sensitivity and specificity of IGFBP-3 were 78.8% and 62.8% respectively when the critical value was 3.32 μg/ml. Conclusions The concentrations of IGF-I and IGFBP-3 were low expressed in serum of patients with colorectal cancer. Meanwhile, they are correlated with the lymphatic metastasis and TNM staging.(Chin J Lab Med, 2017, 40: 871-875) Key words: Colorectal cancer; Insulin like growth factor I; Insulin like growth factor binding protein 3