Expression Of Interleukin-33 In Non-small Cell Lung Cancer Patients And Its Clinical Significance

Objective To investigate the expression of interleukin-33(IL-33) in serum and tissues from non-small cell lung cancer(NSCLC) patients and its clinical application.Methods The enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay was adopted to examine the expression of IL-33 in serum collected from 80 NSCLC patients, 46 lung benign disease(LBD) patients, and 30 healthy donors were served as healthy control(HC) group. The significance of the results was anlyzed,ROC curve and binary logistic regression were applied to compare the diagnostic value of IL-33 and CEA. Techeniques of immunohistochemical staining were employed to detect IL-33 in tissue microarrys containing paired tumor and peritumoral tissues from 90 patients who had undergone lung cancer resection for histologically proven non-small cell lung cancer. And the correlation between IL-33 and clinicopathological characteristics was compared. Overall survival(OS) of different clinicopathological characteristics was compared using Kaplan-Meier and Log-rank test. Reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction(RT-PCR) was used to detect IL-33 mRNA.Results The IL-33 levels in serum of NSCLC patients were higher than those of LBD patients(P < 0.01) and HC group(P < 0.01). Serum expression of IL-33 was significantly correlated with gender, pathological type, TNM stage and the degree of tumor differentiation of patients. The sensitivity(93.67%) and accuracy(85.32%) of IL-33 for NSCLC detection were the highest, while its specifity is the lowest. However, all three parameters of combined detection of IL-33 and CEA were at comparatively high level. The positive rate of IL-33 in peritumor was 51.36%(45/88),significantly higher than that in tumor tissues 17.24%(15/87)(P < 0.01). However, no significant correlation was found between the IL-33 expression and gender, age, tumor size, pathological stage, TNM stage and overall survival time of patients(all P > 0.05). IL-33 mRNA level in tumor tissues was significantly lower than that in peritumor tissues.Conclusion Serum expression of IL-33 was significantly correlated with gender, pathological type, TNM stage and the degree of tumor differentiation of NSCLC patients. The combined detection of IL-33 and CEA showed favorable clinical value and could become a novel potential diagnostic method for NSCLC.