BACKGROUND

Gastric carcinoma is one of the most frequently occurring cancers. The aim of this research was to increase the detection efficiency of anti-p53 antibodies in the sera of patients with gastric carcinoma and to improve the diagnosis for patients with gastric carcinoma.

METHODS

We prepared phage-displayed peptide DO7 and established an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay method to detect the anti-p53 antibodies. We detected the anti-p53 antibodies of 61 patients with gastric carcinoma using the method and our previous ELISA method assisted by the recombinant wild-type human p53 protein to detect the anti-p53 antibodies. We studied the correlation between the anti-p53 antibodies and the clinicopathological data including sex, age, carcinoembryonic antigen, tumor size, tumor TNM staging, and lymph-node status.

RESULTS

The anti-p53 antibodies positive rate for patients with gastric carcinoma was increased (31.1%, 19/61) through the combination of p53-ELISA and phage-ELISA. We found that the positive anti-p53 antibodies correlated significantly with tumor size (P=0.047). The combination of the anti-p53 antibodies and carcinoembryonic antigen could improve the diagnosis for patients with gastric carcinoma.

CONCLUSIONS

This approach indicated an increased anti-p53 antibodies positive rate for patients with gastric carcinoma and provided a useful marker for clinical diagnosis for patients with gastric carcinoma.