The Significance of Detecting Serum HE4 Levels in the Diagnosis of Lung Cancer / 天津医药

ABSTRACT

Objective To discuss the serum value of human epididymis protein 4(HE4) in the diagnosis of lung can-cer and to analyse the serum levels of HE4 in different pathological types and TNM staging of lung cancer patients. Meth-ods Forty-seven patients with lung cancer and thirty-one healthy controls were selected to join this study. According to various pathological types and TNM staging, the selected lung cancer patients were divided into different subgroups under the two categories. The serum HE4 levels were compared between subgroups. ROC curves of serum HE4 level and serum CEA level were drawn for the diagnosis of lung cancer with the pathological diagnosis as the golden standard. Results There was significantly higher level of serum HE4 in lung cancer group[(253.47±170.03) pmol/L] than that of healthy group [(84.09±51.03) pmol/L](t=5.365). There were no significant differences in serum levels of HE4 between different pathological subgroups of lung cancer patients [non-small cell carcinoma group (241.34±161.81) pmol/L vs small cell carcinoma group (293.5±198.76) pmol/L, t=0.847;squamous cell carcinoma group (304.29±287.61) pmol/L, adenocarcinoma group (224.39± 122.15) pmol/L and small cell carcinoma group F=0.969;and different TNM staging subgroups [ (stageⅠ~Ⅲgroup (255.27± 183.04) pmol/L vs stageⅣgroup (288.16±216.49) pmol/L, t=0.528]. Compared with ROC curves of serum HE4 and serum CEA,the area under the curve (AUC) of serum HE4 (0.902) was larger than that of serum CEA(0.765),( P>0.001). When the serum level of HE4 was 149.145 pmol/L, the sensitivity and specificity in the diagnosis of lung cancer were 72.3% and 90.3%. When the serum level of CEA was 4.685μg/L, the sensitivity and specificity in the diagnosis of lung cancer were 57.4%and 83.9%. Conclusion The serum level of HE4 is a sensitive and specific tumor marker in lung cancer. There are no significant differences in the serum levels of HE4 between different pathological types and different TNM staging in lung cancer patients. The detection of serum levels of HE4 are useful for the diagnosis of lung cancer.