Inflammatory Proteins as Molecular Markers in the Diagnosis of Cervical Oncopathology

Imperfection of cytological diagnostics of cervical cancer has prompted the search for alternative methods of pathology detection. The aim of the study was to evaluate the effectiveness of inflammatory proteins as molecular markers in the diagnosis of cervical oncopathology. MATERIALS AND METHODS: A prospective controlled trial was conducted with three groups of women: group 1 (n=13) — with precancerous pathology (cervical intraepithelial neoplasia of grade III); group 2 (n=49) — patients with cervical cancer; group 3, control (n=13) — gynecologically healthy women (mean age — 30.0±4.4 years). The material for the study was cervical epithelium, which was taken according to the standard technique using a cytobrush from the junction zone of cervical. The levels of inflammatory proteins (SAA, ICAM-1, VCAM-1, and sCD27) in the cervical epithelium were determined by flow cytometry. RESULTS: Molecular criteria for the presence of precancerous pathology and cervical cancer have been found to be a 3.10 [1.31; 3.28] fold increase in SAA values (U=41.0, p=0.02), 2.62 [2.79 3.50] fold (U=137.0, p=0.001) in ICAM-1, 5.20 [3.84; 12.37] fold (U=138.5, p=0.001) in VCAM-1, and 4.32 [2.07; 5.02] fold (U=109.0, p<0.001) in sCD27 in cervical epithelium compared with the control group data. The COP (cervical oncoproblem) coefficient was developed to calculate the probability of cervical oncological pathology presence with the accuracy of 90%. An application for Android was created in Delphi development environment to simplify its calculation. CONCLUSION: The created technology makes it possible to establish the diagnosis in the shortest possible time and to optimize the treatment and diagnostic process by accelerating the examination period and improving its accuracy.