Serum relaxin as a diagnostic and prognostic marker in patients with epithelial ovarian cancer.

Background And Aim: Relaxin is a short circulating peptide hormone. The aim of this study was to understand the role of relaxin in progression of epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) and to assess its diagnostic and prognostic significance.

Methods: A total of 124 patients with EOC, 46 patients with benign ovarian diseases, and 50 healthy controls were recruited. Serum levels of relaxin were determined by ELISA method. The relationship between serum relaxin level and each of the clinicopathological parameters was analyzed using the χ2 test. Survival curves were plotted using the Kaplan-Meier method. The statistical difference in survival between the different groups was compared using the log-rank test. Survival correlation with the prognostic factors was further investigated by multivariate analysis using the Cox proportional hazards model with backward stepwise likelihood ratio.

Results: The results showed that serum relaxin level was significantly higher in patients with EOC than those with benign ovarian diseases and healthy controls (p< 0.01). Serum relaxin level was associated with FIGO stage, lymph node metastasis, tumor resectability, survival of the patients, chemotherapy and tumor recurrence (p< 0.05). Analysis using the Kaplan-meier method indicated that patients with high serum relaxin had significantly shorter overall survival time than those with low relaxin (p< 0.01). In a multivariate analysis along with clinical prognostic parameters, serum relaxin was identified as an independent adverse prognostic variable for survival.

Conclusions: These results indicated that serum relaxin may be a clinically useful indicator for diagnostic and prognostic evaluation in EOC patients.