Identification of colorectal neoplasia by using serum bile acid profile

Abstract

Background

Colonoscopy is the gold standard for detecting earlier stages of CRC, although screening of patients is difficult because of invasiveness, low compliance and procedural health risks. Therefore, the need for new screening methods for CRC is rising. Previous studies have demonstrated the diagnostic ability of serum BAs; however, the results have been inconsistent. In this study, we conducted a comprehensive analysis of serum BAs from patients with CRC and verified their diagnostic ability to detect CRC.

Methods

A total of 56 CRC patients (n = 14 each of stages I–IV), 59 patients with colonic adenoma and 60 healthy controls were included. Age and sex were matched for each group. Serum BA compositions were measured by LC-MS/MS and serum concentration of 30 types of BAs were analysed by discriminant analysis with multidimensional scaling method.

Results

Free CA, 3epi-DCA&CDCA, 3-dehydro CA, GCA and TCA were extracted as principal component (PC) 1 and free 3-dehydroDCA as PC 2 by canonical discriminant function coefficients. The verification of discriminability using cross-validation method revealed that the correct classification rate was 66.3% for original data and 52.6% for cross-validation data.

Conclusions

A combined analysis using comprehensive serum BA concentration can be an efficient method for screening CRC.

Keywords:

• Colorectal cancer
• serum
• bile acid
• adenoma
• LC-MS/MS

Acknowledgement

We thank all members of the Department of Molecular Gastroenterology and Hepatology, Kyoto Prefectural University of Medicine Graduate School of Medical Science, for helping with this study. We also thank Hajime Yamakage [Satista Co., Ltd.], who assisted with statistical analysis.

Disclosure statement

YN received scholarship funds from EA Pharma. Co. Ltd.; a collaboration research fund from Taiyo Kagaku Co., Ltd.; and received lecture fees by Mylan EPD Co., Takeda Pharma. Co. Ltd., Mochida Pharma. Co. Ltd., EA Pharma. Co. Ltd., Otsuka Pharma. Co. Ltd. and Miyarisan Pharma. Co. Ltd. This research was partly supported by these funds. Neither the funding agency nor any outside organization has participated in the study design or have any competing interests. These companies have approved the final version of the manuscript.

Additional information

Funding

This work was partly supported by a grant from the Industry-Academia-Government Collaboration of ‘Field for Knowledge Integration and Innovation’ (FKII) to Y.N. [No. 16824414] from the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries of Japan, a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (KAKENHI) (C) to K.U. [No. 18K06224] from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (KAKENHI) (C) to T.T. [No. 20K08292] from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS).