AI Article Synopsis

  • Scientists are studying blood biomarkers as a safer way to help diagnose and track brain cancer called glioblastoma, instead of using risky tissue samples.
  • They checked a part of DNA called MGMT methylation in both blood and tissue from patients to see how well these two methods work together.
  • The tests showed that while they can find methylation in blood, the results don't always match tissue samples, and improvements are needed before blood tests can replace tissue tests completely.

Article Abstract

Circulating biomarkers in blood may provide an interesting alternative to risky tissue biopsies in the diagnosis and follow-up of glioblastoma patients. We have assessed MGMT methylation status in blood and tissue samples from unresected glioblastoma patients who had been included in the randomized GENOM-009 trial. Paired blood and tissue samples were assessed by methylation-specific PCR (MSP) and pyrosequencing (PYR). After establishing the minimum PYR cut-off that could yield a significant difference in overall survival, we assessed the sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value and negative predictive value (NPV) of the analyses. Methylation could be detected in cfDNA by both MSP and PYR but with low concordance with results in tissue. Sensitivity was low for both methods (31% and 38%, respectively), while specificity was higher for MSP in blood than for PYR in plasma (96% vs 76%) and NPV was similar (56 vs 57%). Concordance of results in tissue by MSP and PYR was 84.3% (P < 0.001) and correlated with outcome. We conclude that detection of cfDNA in the blood of glioblastoma patients can be an alternative when tumor tissue is not available but methods for the detection of cfDNA in blood must improve before it can replace analysis in tumor tissue.

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Source
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6668570PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-47642-2DOI Listing

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