Publication:

Tissue polypeptide specific antigen and cancer antigen-15.3 as predictive biomarkers for metastasis in breast cancer

Background The management of metastatic breast cancer patients reflects the heterogeneous nature of the disease. Distant metastasis of breast cancer is the main reason for the increasing mortality of breast cancer patients due to failure of breast cancer treatment. This study aimed at determining the association between levels of tissue polypeptide-specific antigen (TPS) compared with cancer antigen-15.3 (CA-15.3) as biomarkers for metastasis in breast cancers.

Methods This is a cross-sectional study involving one-hundred and fifty (150) female participants who presented with histologically confirmed new cases of breast cancer at the Oncology Clinic of Lagos State University Teaching Hospital Ikeja. Blood samples were collected and run using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), for TPS and CA-15.3. Data were analyzed using statistical package for the social sciences (SPSS) version 26.0 (Inc., Chicago, Ill). The comparison of median TPS and CA-15.3 between two groups was evaluated using the Mann-Whitney U test. Statistical significance was considered when the p value was ≤0.05.

Results The most represented age group was 50 to 59 years (36.6%) with overall mean age, age and at diagnosis of 49.21±10.1 years, and 48.76±10.1 years respectively. There was statistically significant increase in CA-15.3 with increasing clinical stage of the participants (p 0.05). The AUC for CA-15.3 and TPS were 0.679 (95% CI=0.593-0.766) and 0.524 (95% CI=0.430-0.618) respectively.

Conclusions CA-15.3 has a better diagnostic ability for predicting distant metastasis in breast cancer.