Feasibility of visfatin as a molecular marker of breast cancer / 中国医师杂志

ABSTRACT

Objective:To investigate the value of visfatin in the differential diagnosis of benign and malignant breast tumors and the feasibility of visfatin as a molecular marker of breast cancer.Methods:A total of 195 breast cancer patients hospitalized in the Cancer Hospital of The University of Chinese Academy of Sciences from December 2017 to July 2018 were selected as the breast cancer group, all of them were women. 80 patients with benign breast diseases in the same period were randomly selected as the breast benign disease group, all of them were women. 80 female employees with normal physical examination in the same year were selected as the normal control group. Enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) was used to detect the serum level of visfatin. Logistic regression was used to analyze the relationship between visfatin and clinicopathological features of breast cancer. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was drawn to get area under curve (AUC) value, and the diagnostic efficacy was analyzed.Results:The serum visfatin level in breast cancer group was significantly higher than that in benign breast disease group and normal control group ( P<0.05). Univariate analysis showed that the serum visfatin level was related to lymph node metastasis, tumor node metastasis (TNM) stage and body mass index (BMI) (all P<0.05). The serum visfatin level was positively correlated with TNM stage and lymph node metastasis of breast cancer patients ( r=0.336, P=0.043; r=0.632, P=0.027, respectively). Multivariate regression analysis showed that lymph node metastasis was a risk factor for serum visfatin [ OR=1.098, 95% CI(1.073, 1.226), P=0.02]. According to the ROC curve of serum visfatin level in benign breast disease group and normal group, the AUC of serum visfatin were 0.652 and 0.701, respectively. When the Youden index was the highest, the sensitivity was 52.30% and 55.90% respectively, and the specificity was 73.10% and 75.0% respectively. Conclusions:Serum visfatin level can be used to distinguish benign and malignant breast cancer patients. It has a certain clinical value in the auxiliary diagnosis of breast cancer, and may be used as a potential molecular marker of breast cancer.