Correlation analysis between serum neuron-specific enolase and the detection of gene mutations in lung adenocarcinoma

BACKGROUND: Lung cancer is a chronic, progressive and malignant disease associated with ever-growing incidence and mortality. Targeted therapy plays an important role in the clinical treatment of lung cancer. Besides, neuron-specific enolase (NSE), an intracellular enzyme, is highly correlated with the targeted treatment outcome in patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). The present study aimed to explore the correlation of NSE with the detection of gene mutations. METHODS: It is a case-control study. From June 2017 to October 2019, the newly diagnosed patients with lung adenocarcinoma were enrolled from the First Affiliated Hospital of Anhui Medical University. Next-generation sequencing (NGS) was conducted in these patients. Kruskal-Wallis test was used to calculate the difference in NSE levels between mutant and non-mutant group and the differences were compared between blood and tissue samples. RESULTS: Compared with patients with no gene mutation (15.4±7.8 mmol/L), the NSE levels in patients with gene mutations were remarkably increased in blood sample group (22.2±12.9 mmol/L) (P<0.05). Besides, the linear regression model was applied for analysis which further emphasized the close relationship between them. The area under the ROC curve (AUC) of NSE was 0.7300 [95% confidence interval (CI): 0.6059–0.8541] and optimal threshold was 18.5650 U/mL with a sensitivity of 87.50% and a specificity of 52.08%. In addition, NSE levels increased in blood sample group, suggesting that the occurrence of polygenic mutation with dismal prognosis, but no correlation was detected in tissue sample group. CONCLUSIONS: This study elucidates the functional role of NSE, and findings in this study notably increase the gene detection efficiency for lung adenocarcinoma.