Lung cancer including non-small cell lung carcinoma (NSCLC) represents a leading cause of cancer death in Western countries. Yet, understanding its pathobiology to improve early diagnosis and therapeutic strategies is still a major challenge of today's biomedical research. We analyzed a set of differentially regulated genes that were identified in skin cancer by a comprehensive microarray study, for their expression in NSCLC. We found that ferm domain containing protein 3 (FRMD3), a member of the protein 4.1 superfamily, is expressed in normal lung tissue but silenced in 54 out of 58 independent primary NSCLC tumours compared to patient-matched normal lung tissue. FRMD3 overexpression in different epithelial cell lines resulted in a decreased clonogenicity as measured by colony formation assay. Although cell attachment capabilities and cell proliferation rate remained unchanged, this phenotype was most likely owing to induced apoptosis. Our data identify FRMD3 as a novel putative tumour suppressor gene suggesting an important role in the origin and progression of lung cancer.
We conclude that pulmonary metastasectomy for metastases of malignant melanoma is a safe treatment modality which may actually be of benefit in selected patients with stage IV malignant melanoma. When pulmonary metastases of malignant melanoma are present, every attempt should be made to completely resect all clinically detected metastases.
We conclude that a reduced slice thickness may have an important positive impact on the treatment and outcome of patients with pulmonary metastases. The use of 3-mm slice thickness helical CT may raise the sensitivity for pulmonary metastases detection compared to 5-mm images, but the rate of false positive results may also increase.
The capacity of pretherapeutically assessed neuron-specific enolase (NSE) to differentiate between small cell lung cancer (SCLC) and mediastinal tumors was investigated retrospectively in a series of 320 patients. NSE was found to be increased in 95/130 (73.1%) patients with SCLC, in 4/62 (6.5%) patients with Hodgkin’s disease, in 10/58 (17.2%) patients with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, in 5/16 (31.3%) patients with teratoma, and in 6/54 (11.1 %) patients with thymoma. The cut-off value, defined as the 95% percentile of a reference population suffering from benign pulmonary disorders (n = 192), was set at 13.8 ng/ml. When this discrimination level was increased to 26.4 ng/ml, which corresponds to a 95% specificity versus the total group with mediastinal tumors, SCLC was recognized with a detection rate of only 49.2%. In conclusion, increased NSE concentrations in a patient with a hilar mass and/or mediastinal widening on X-ray are not always diagnostic of SCLC due to the high rate of elevated NSE values associated with mediastinal tumors. However, in a patient who presents with a hilar mass and a high NSE level, bronchoscopy is always indicated to obtain adequate specimens for histology in order to plan an appropriate therapeutic regimen.
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