| Abstract
| - Proto-oncogenes are genes coding for factors involved in cellular growth, reproduction, and differentiation. Cancer resufts through mutations of proto-oncogenes or through other mechanisms involving the products of proto-oncogenes. This study asks whether serum proteins immunologically related to the products of proto-oncogenes distinguish older men and women who manifest a new cancer during a 2-year follow-up. The authors conducted a nested case-control study that involved 248 men and women selected from a larger group of older (age >65 years) healthy volunteers in a randomized clinical trial of preventive clinical services. Study subjects included 37 with a fatal cancer, 59 non-fatal breast, prostate, colon, or lung cancer, 58 hospitalized with at least one discharge diagnosis that coded to benign neoplasia (International Classification of Diseases, 9th Revision codes 210-239), and 94 randomly selected controls. Using seven monoclonal antibodies prepared against ras, erb-B, FES, myb, and SIS polypeptide sequences, immunoblots detected 17 proteins in serum collected from subjects before the clinical recognition of cancer. Five oncogene-related serum proteins appeared to distinguish older persons who manifested fatal (but not non-fatal) cancer over a brief (2-year) follow-up. Older persons hospitalized with benign neoplasia also had higher levels of these serum proteins. Relative to the 94 control subjects, a 52, 000 dalton SIS-related protein (odd ratio (OR) = 5.9, 95% confidence interval (Cl) 1.4-24.9) and a 35, 000 dalton k-ras-related protein (OR = 11.3, 95% Cl 1.2-104) were particularly common in serum from the 37 subjects who manifested a fatal cancer. Am J Epidemiol 1996; 144: 723-7.
|
