Department of Surgery and Cancer, Imperial College London, 10th Floor QEQM Wing, St Mary's Hospital, London W2 1NY, United Kingdom.
Anal Chem. 2012 Nov 6;84(21):9550-7. doi: 10.1021/ac302409a. Epub 2012 Oct 17.
Gastric content is a complex biofluid within the human stomach which has an important role in digestive processes. It is believed that gastric content may be a contributory factor in the development of upper gastro-intestinal diseases. In this work, selected ion flow tube mass spectrometry (SIFT-MS) has been applied to the quantification of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the headspace vapor of gastric content samples, which were retrieved from three groups of patients, including those with gastro-esophageal cancer, noncancer diseases of the upper gastro-intestinal tract, and a healthy cohort. Twelve VOCs have been investigated in this study; the following 7 VOCs, acetone, formaldehyde, acetaldehyde, hexanoic acid, hydrogen sulphide, hydrogen cyanide, and methyl phenol, were found to be significantly different between cancer and healthy groups by the Mann-Whitney U test. Receiver operating characteristics (ROC) analysis was applied for the combined VOCs of acetaldehyde, formaldehyde, hydrogen sulphide, and methyl phenol to discriminate cancer patients from healthy controls. The area under the curve (AUC) was 0.9. This result raises the prospect that a VOC profile rather than a single biomarker may be preferable in the molecular-orientated diagnosis of gastro-oseophageal cancer, and this warrants further investigation to assess its potential application as a new diagnostic test.
胃内容物是人类胃中的一种复杂生物流体，在消化过程中起着重要作用。据认为，胃内容物可能是上消化道疾病发展的一个促成因素。在这项工作中，选择离子淌度质谱（SIFT-MS）已应用于胃内容物样品顶空蒸气中挥发性有机化合物（VOC）的定量分析，这些样品取自三组患者，包括胃食管癌症患者、上消化道非癌症疾病患者和健康队列。本研究共研究了 12 种 VOC；通过曼-惠特尼 U 检验发现，癌症组和健康组之间有 7 种 VOC（丙酮、甲醛、乙醛、己酸、硫化氢、氢氰酸和甲基苯酚）存在显著差异。应用受试者工作特征（ROC）分析对组合的乙醛、甲醛、硫化氢和甲基苯酚的 VOC 进行分析，以区分癌症患者和健康对照者。曲线下面积（AUC）为 0.9。这一结果提出了一种可能性，即与单一生物标志物相比，VOC 谱可能更适合于以分子为导向的胃食管癌症诊断，这需要进一步研究来评估其作为新的诊断测试的潜在应用。
