Urinary Polyamines: A Pilot Study on Their Roles as Prostate Cancer Detection Biomarkers.

Current screening methods towards prostate cancer (PCa) are not without limitations. Research work has been on-going to assess if there are other better tests suitable for primary or secondary screening of PCa to supplement the serum prostate specific antigen (PSA) test, which fails to work accurately in a grey zone of 4-10ng/ml. In this pilot study, the potential roles of urinary polyamines as prostate cancer biomarkers were evaluated. PCa, benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) patients and healthy controls (HC) showing PSA>4.0ng/ml were enrolled in the study. Their urine samples were obtained, and the urinary levels of putrescine (Put), spermidine (Spd) and spermine (Spm) were determined by ultra-high performance liquid chromatography coupled with triple quadrupole mass spectrometer (UPLC-MS/MS). Receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curve and Student's t-test were used to evaluate their diagnostic accuracies. Among the three biogenic polyamines, Spm had demonstrated a good diagnostic performance when comparing their levels in PCa patients with BPH patients (1.47 in PCa vs 5.87 in BPH; p<0.0001). Results are in accordance with transrectal ultrasound prostatic biopsy (TRUSPB) results, with an area under curve (AUC) value of 0.83±0.03. Therefore urinary Spm shows potential to serve as a novel PCa diagnostic biomarker, which in turn can help to address the limited sensitivity and specificity problem of serum PSA test.

Polymorphisms and vascular cognitive impairment after ischemic stroke.

Environmental and genetic factors may both affect the risk of vascular cognitive impairment developing after a stroke. To identify factors affecting this risk, the cognitive status of 121 patients was examined 3 months after an ischemic stroke. In all patients and in 270 control subjects, 7 polymorphisms reported to affect risk of vascular ischemic disease were genotyped. In 51 patients (42.1%), vascular cognitive impairment resulted, defined by a Mini-Mental State Examination score of less than 24. These patients were older and more likely to be women. Alleles of none of the polymorphisms differed between patients with or without vascular cognitive impairment, except for glutamate-cysteine ligase modifier (GCLM) (odds ratio = 2.8, P = .006). When all stroke patients were considered, the GCLM genotype did not affect Mini-Mental State Examination scores. Testing the GCLM genotype in an independent group of stroke patients may determine whether this association with vascular cognitive impairment is genuine.