A Novel Adipokine, Asprosin, may be a serum biomarker for breast cancer diagnosis

Abstract OBJECTIVE: Breast cancer is the most common type of cancer in women. Diagnosis in early stage is very important for cancer treatment. There is no good biomarker to diagnose breast cancer in T1-2 or N0 stage. The aim of this study was to evaluate the diagnostic efficacy of asprosin as a biomarker within all stages of breast cancer. PATIENTS AND METHODS: An enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) was used to evaluate serum asprosin levels in 40 patients with breast cancer and 40 healthy women. The Cancer group included T1-4, N1-3, and M0-1 patients. RESULTS: Asprosin showed good discrimination (Area under curve (AUC) = 0.767, 95% confidence interval (CI):0.657–0.878) between breast cancer and the healthy group and acceptable discriminating ability (sensitivity = 0.825; specificity = 0.750) at the optimal cut-off value of 1.82 ng/mL. Asprosin indicated no difference for T, N, and M stages (p= 0.919, p= 0.859, and p= 0.225 respectively). CONCLUSIONS: Asprosin may be a good diagnostic biomarker for breast cancer at all stages, regardless of T, N, and M stages. Larger prospective clinical studies are required to validate the utility of this method.