Biomarkers for Predicting Malignant Pleural Mesothelioma in a Mexican Population.

International Journal of Medical Sciences 2018 June 4 [Link]

Aguilar-Madrid G, Pesch B, Calderón-Aranda ES, Burek K, Jiménez-Ramírez C, Juárez-Pérez CA, Ochoa-Vázquez MD, Torre-Bouscoulet L, Acosta-Saavedra LC, Sada-Ovalle I, García-Figueroa J, Alvarado-Cabrero I, Castillo-González P, Báez-Saldaña AR, Pérez-Padilla JR, Osnaya-Juárez J, Rivera-Rosales RM, García-Bazán EM, Bautista-Aragón YL, Lazcano-Hernandez E, Munguía-Canales DA, Argote-Greene LM, Taeger D, Weber DG, Casjens S, Raiko I, Brüning T, Johnen G

Abstract

Background: Diagnosis of malignant pleural mesothelioma (MPM) remains a challenge, especially when resources in pathology are limited. The study aimed to evaluate cost-effective tumor markers to predict the probability of MPM in plasma samples in order to accelerate the diagnostic workup of the tissue of potential cases. Methods: We conducted a case-control study stratified by gender, which included 75 incident cases with MPM from three Mexican hospitals and 240 controls frequency-matched by age and year of blood drawing. Plasma samples were obtained to determine mesothelin, calretinin, and thrombomodulin using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISAs). We estimated the performance of the markers based on the area under the curve (AUC) and predicted the probability of an MPM diagnosis of a potential case based on the marker concentrations. Results: Mesothelin and calretinin, but not thrombomodulin were significant predictors of a diagnosis of MPM with AUCs of 0.90 (95% CI: 0.85-0.95), 0.88 (95% CI: 0.82-0.94), and 0.51 (95% CI: 0.41-0.61) in males, respectively. For MPM diagnosis in men we estimated a true positive rate of 0.79 and a false positive rate of 0.11 for mesothelin. The corresponding figures for calretinin were 0.81 and 0.18, and for both markers combined 0.84 and 0.11, respectively. Conclusions: We developed prediction models based on plasma concentrations of mesothelin and calretinin to estimate the probability of an MPM diagnosis. Both markers showed a good performance and could be used to accelerate the diagnostic workup of tissue samples in Mexico.