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

PLoS One. 2016 Sep 6;11(9):e0162217. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0162217. eCollection 2016.

Abstract

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.

MeSH terms

  • Aged
  • Aged, 80 and over
  • Area Under Curve
  • Biomarkers, Tumor / blood
  • Biomarkers, Tumor / urine*
  • Biopsy
  • Case-Control Studies
  • Chromatography, High Pressure Liquid
  • Diagnosis, Differential
  • Humans
  • Male
  • Middle Aged
  • Neoplasm Grading
  • Prostate / metabolism
  • Prostate / pathology
  • Prostate / surgery*
  • Prostate-Specific Antigen / blood*
  • Prostatic Hyperplasia / diagnosis*
  • Prostatic Hyperplasia / pathology
  • Prostatic Hyperplasia / surgery
  • Prostatic Hyperplasia / urine
  • Prostatic Neoplasms / diagnosis*
  • Prostatic Neoplasms / pathology
  • Prostatic Neoplasms / surgery
  • Prostatic Neoplasms / urine
  • Putrescine / urine
  • Spermidine / urine
  • Spermine / urine*
  • Ultrasound, High-Intensity Focused, Transrectal

Substances

  • Biomarkers, Tumor
  • Spermine
  • Prostate-Specific Antigen
  • Spermidine
  • Putrescine

Grants and funding

The authors thank the staffs and patients of this pilot study for their important contributions and are grateful for the financial support from the grants from The Hong Kong Research Grants Council (HKBU 203013 and HKPolyU 5032/11P), http://www.ugc.edu.hk/eng/rgc/.