Urine Cell-Free DNA Integrity Analysis for Early Detection of Prostate Cancer Patients

Introduction. The detection of tumor-specific markers in urine has paved the way for new early noninvasive diagnostic approaches for prostate cancer. We evaluated the DNA integrity in urine supernatant to verify its capacity to discriminate between prostate cancer and benign diseases of the urogenital tract. Patients and Methods. A total of 131 individuals were enrolled: 67 prostate cancer patients and 64 patients with benign diseases of the urogenital tract (control group). Prostate-specific antigen (PSA) levels were determined. Urine cell-free (UCF) DNA was isolated and sequences longer than 250 bp corresponding to 3 genes (c-MYC, HER2, and AR) were quantified by Real-Time PCR to assess UCF-DNA integrity. Results. UCF-DNA was quantifiable in all samples, while UCF-DNA integrity was evaluable in all but 16 samples. Receiver operating characteristic analysis showed an area under the curve of 0.5048 for UCF-DNA integrity and 0.8423 for PSA. Sensitivity was 0.58 and 0.95 for UCF-DNA integrity and PSA, respectively. Specificity was 0.44 and 0.69, respectively. Conclusions. UCF-DNA integrity showed lower accuracy than PSA and would not seem to be a reliable marker for early prostate cancer diagnosis. Despite this, we believe that UCF-DNA could represent a source of other biomarkers and could detect gene alterations.