BOSTON, March 5 (UPI) -- A U.S. scientist says gene expression patterns in smokers' lung cells might aid the early detection of lung cancer, the leading cause of cancer deaths.
The disease's high mortality rate results in part from a lack of tools to diagnose the disease at an early stage, said Dr. Avrum Spira and colleagues at Boston University. But since cigarette smoke is a well-known risk factor, the researchers investigated whether gene expression in normal epithelial cells from the lungs of smokers suspected to have lung cancer could be used as a biomarker of disease status.
The biomarker the authors studied was approximately 90 percent accurate in predicting which patients would not go on to develop the disease. When combined with histological data the accuracy increased to 95 percent.
The researchers suggest gene expression in normal lung epithelial cells can serve as a lung cancer biomarker that might lead to a reduction in mortality by helping clinicians diagnose the disease earlier than is currently possible.
The study appears in the March issue of the journal Nature Medicine.
