A diagnostic biomarker of acid glycoprotein 1 for distinguishing malignant from benign pulmonary lesions.

Background: The acid glycoprotein 1 (AGP1) is downregulated in lung cancer. However, the performance of AGP1 in distinguishing benign from malignant lung lesions is still unknown.

Methods: The expression of AGP1 in benign diseases and lung cancer samples was detected by Western blot. The receiver operating characteristic curves, bivariate correlation, and multivariate analysis was analyzed by SPSS software.

Results: AGP1 expression levels were significantly downregulated in lung cancer and correlated with carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA), CA199, and CA724 tumor biomarkers. The diagnostic performance of AGP1 for distinguishing malignant from benign pulmonary lesions was better than the other four clinical biomarkers including CEA, squamous cell carcinoma-associated antigen, neuron-specific enolase, and cytokeratin 19 fragment 21-1, with an area under the curve value of 0.713 at 88.8% sensitivity. Furthermore, the multivariate analysis indicated that the variates of thrombin time and potassium significantly affected the AGP1 levels in lung cancer.

Conclusions: Our study indicates that AGP1 expression is decreased in lung cancer compared to benign samples, which helps distinguish benign and malignant pulmonary lesions.