Detection of hydrothorax or ascites in patients with cancers using immunomagnetic beads technique / 中国癌症杂志

ABSTRACT

Background and purpose:Nowadays, the golden standard of diagnosis for malignant hydrothorax or ascites is exfoliocytology examination, but the missed diagnosis rate is too high. Other methods including immunologic test, telomerase activation test, conjugation of chromosome analysis with cytological examination test, and RT-PCR test. But none of them was widely used due to high cost or high false positive rate. Immunomagnetic beads (IMB) technique is a popular method all over the world in recent years. It was mainly used in isolating and purifying cells, but it was rarely used to detect cancer cells in patients with hydrothorax or ascites so far. Our aim was to fi nd an effi cient way to detect the cancer cells in patients with cancer related hydrothorax or ascites and to improve the corresponding diagnosis rate. Methods:In the experiments, both the traditional exfoliocytology examination method and IMB technique were used to detect the cancer cells in the hydrothorax or the ascites for comparison. Results:Using IMB technique and exfoliocytology method, the positive rates in 30 patients with cancers were 63.3% (19/30) and 23.3% (7/30), respectively, and the false positive rates in 30 patients without cancers were 3.3% (1/30) and 0.0% (0/30), respectively. It could be observed that the positive rate using IMB technique was much higher than that using exfoliocytology method (P0.05). Conclusions:The present study demonstrated that IMB technique is an accurate, sensitive, fast and economic method in detecting the cancer cells in patients with cancer related hydrothorax or ascites, especially for diagnosis and therapy in the early clinical stage. Due to the high effi ciency, IMB technique could be used after exfoliocytology examination to improve the diagnosis rate..