Abstract
Although prostate cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer among men in developed populations, recent recommendations against routine prostate-specific antigen screening have cast doubt on its utility for early detection. We compared the metabolomic profiles of prospectively collected fasting serum from 74 prostate cancer cases and 74 controls selected from the Alpha-Tocopherol, Beta-Carotene Cancer Prevention Study cohort of male smokers. Circulating 1-stearoylglycerol (1-SG, or 1-monostearin) was statistically significantly inversely associated with risk of prostate cancer after Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons (i.e., 420 identified metabolites) (OR 0.34, 95 % CI 0.20–0.58, p 6.3 × 10−5). The magnitude of this association did not differ by disease aggressiveness and was observed for cases diagnosed up to 23 years after blood collection. Similar but somewhat weaker prostate cancer risk signals were also evident for glycerol and alpha-ketoglutarate. In this population, men with higher serum 1-SG were less likely to develop prostate cancer, supporting a role for dysregulation of lipid metabolism in this malignancy. Additional studies are needed to retest the association and to examine 1-SG for its potential as a prostate cancer early detection marker.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the Intramural Research Program of the National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health (U.S. Public Health Service), and U.S. Public Health Service contracts N01-CN-45165, N01-RC-45035, N01-RC-37004, HHSN261201000006C, HHSN261200800001E.
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All procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2000. Informed consent was obtained from all patients for being included in the study.
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Mondul, A.M., Moore, S.C., Weinstein, S.J. et al. 1-Stearoylglycerol is associated with risk of prostate cancer: results from a serum metabolomic profiling analysis. Metabolomics 10, 1036–1041 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11306-014-0643-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11306-014-0643-0