Department of Pathology, Tohoku University Graduate School of Medicine, 2-1 Seriyo-machi, Aoba-ku, Sendai 980-8575, Miyagi-ken, Japan.
Steroids. 2011 Jul;76(8):759-64. doi: 10.1016/j.steroids.2011.02.020. Epub 2011 Mar 8.
Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer mortality in both women and men worldwide but gender differences exist in their clinical and biological manifestations. In particular, among life time non-smoker, female are far more likely to develop lung carcinoma than male. Recent studies demonstrated that estrogens are synthesized in situ in both male and female lung cancers through aromatase, suggesting that sex steroid may contribute to the pathogenesis and development of lung carcinoma. In addition, human lung carcinomas have been recently demonstrated to be frequently associated with expression of estrogen receptors in both male and female patients and a lower expression of aromatase was reported to be associated with better prognosis. Preclinical studies further demonstrated that aromatase inhibitor (AI) suppressed the lung tumor growth both in vitro and in vivo. These findings all suggest a potential role of intratumoral aromatase in biological behavior of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), the most common form of human lung malignancy. Therefore, AIs may become viable therapeutic options for disease management in NSCLC patients but further studies are definitely required to obtain a better understanding of the potential roles of intratumoral aromatase expression as a predictive biomarker for clinical outcome in these NSCLC patients.
肺癌是全球范围内导致男女癌症死亡的主要原因，但在其临床表现和生物学特征上存在性别差异。特别是在终身不吸烟者中，女性比男性更容易患上肺癌。最近的研究表明，男性和女性肺癌中的雌激素都是通过芳香酶原位合成的，这表明性激素可能有助于肺癌的发病和发展。此外，最近的研究表明，人类肺癌与男性和女性患者中雌激素受体的表达密切相关，并且报道称芳香酶的低表达与更好的预后相关。临床前研究进一步表明，芳香酶抑制剂（AI）可抑制体外和体内的肺肿瘤生长。这些发现都表明，肿瘤内芳香酶在非小细胞肺癌（NSCLC）的生物学行为中可能具有潜在作用，这是非小细胞肺癌是最常见的人类肺癌形式。因此，AIs 可能成为 NSCLC 患者疾病管理的可行治疗选择，但需要进一步研究以更好地了解肿瘤内芳香酶表达作为这些 NSCLC 患者临床结局的预测生物标志物的潜在作用。
