0000000000008222
AUTHOR
Jose Santamaria
Cell-Free Circulating Plasma hTERT mRNA Is a Useful Marker for Prostate Cancer Diagnosis and Is Associated with Poor Prognosis Tumor Characteristics
BackgroundSerum prostate-specific antigen (PSA) is the most widely used marker for diagnosing prostate cancer (PCa). It lacks specificity and predictive value, resulting in inaccurate diagnoses and overtreatment of the disease. The aim of this study was to assess the usefulness of plasma telomerase reverse transcriptase (hTERT) mRNA as a diagnostic and prognostic tool for PCa and its association with clinicopathological parameters of tumors.Principal findingsPlasma hTERT mRNA levels were determined by qRT-PCR in 105 consecutive patients with elevated PSA levels and in 68 healthy volunteers. The diagnostic accuracy, the efficacy as a prognostic factor of biochemical recurrence and the associ…
GRASP & evolutionary path relinking for medical image registration based on point matching
Image registration is a very active research area in computer vision. Image registration methods, aim to find a transformation between two images taken under different conditions. Point matching is an image registration approach based on searching for the right pairing of points between the two images. From this matching, the registration transformation can be inferred by means of numerical methods. In this paper, we tackle the medical image registration problem adapting a new advanced hybrid metaheuristic composed by the GRASP and the evolutionary path relinking algorithms, called G&EvPR. The experiments conducted in this work have shown the good performance of G&EvPR compared to similar a…
Plasma hTERT mRNA discriminates between clinically localized and locally advanced disease and is a predictor of recurrence in prostate cancer patients
Since the introduction of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) testing, new prostate cancer (PCa) patients are diagnosed earlier and most have localized and locally advanced disease. Current diagnosis methods lack specificity and sensitivity, leading to overdiagnosis and overtreatment of patients with low-risk organ-confined localized disease. Therefore, new non-invasive molecular tools are needed to discriminate between localized and locally advanced disease.Plasma telomerase reverse transcriptase (hTERT) mRNA levels were determined by qRT-PCR in 49 patients with localized and locally advanced PCa. Diagnostic accuracy and efficacy as a prognostic factor of biochemical recurrence of plasma hTERT…
Real-Time Quantification of Human Telomerase Reverse Transcriptase mRNA in the Plasma of Patients with Prostate Cancer
The aim of this study was to evaluate the potential diagnostic value of quantitative analysis of human telomerase reverse transcriptase (hTERT) mRNA in plasma for noninvasive diagnosis of prostate cancer (PCa). Expression levels of hTERT were analyzed by real-time quantitative RT-PCR in 68 patients showing elevated prostate-specific antigen (PSA) levels and a control group of 44 healthy volunteers. Sensitivity and specificity were determined and compared to the corresponding PSA values. Median values for hTERT gene expression in the PCa patients (0.72 ng; range 0.01-12.86) were statistically significantly higher (P < 0.001) than in the control group (0.13 ng; 0.02-0.35). Patients with clini…