Salivary IL-8 as a putative predictive biomarker of radiotherapy response in head and neck cancer patients.

Objectives: Ionizing radiation increases the expression of a number of salivary proteins involved in immunoregulatory networks related to infection, injury, inflammation, and cancer. Our main objective was to analyze whether there are significant differences in salivary cytokines before and after radiotherapy and whether any of them are associated to better outcomes after radiotherapy serving as a potential predictive biomarker of response to the treatment.

Materials And Methods: We analyzed a panel of eight salivary markers (IL-4, IL-6, IL-8, and IL-10; MCP-1; TNF-α; VEGF; and EGF) in a group of HNC patients (N = 30), before and after irradiation treatment pre- and post-RT.

Salivary Cytokines in patients with Head and Neck Cancer (HNC) treated with Radiotherapy.

Background: Head and Neck cancer (HNC) is the sixth most common cancer in the world. The 5-year survival rate depends on early diagnosis and appropriate therapy. Typically, late diagnosis requires not only surgical intervention, but also radiotherapy treatment combined or not with chemotherapy.

Salivary inflammatory proteins in patients with oral potentially malignant disorders.

Cytokines are a group of small proteins involved in the regulation of infection, immune responses and inflammation. Since altered cytokine responsiveness has been linked to Oral Squamous Cell Carcinoma (OSCC), research to date indicates the possibility of using salivary pro- and anti-inflammatory proteins for screening of oral disorders. OSCC is a multistep neoplasia in which many genetic and epigenetic changes have been correlated to cancerous transformation of oral potentially malignant disorders (OPMD) such as oral leukoplakia, erythroplakia and lichen planus.