Serum biomarkers in silicosis: current perspectives

Silicosis is still one of the main occupational diseases in China.Early diagnosis or prediction may be very useful to control the disease, yet only relatively late stage patients with silicosis could be diagnosed based on radiological and lung function abnormalities.Seeking for biomarkers in blood serum that change their values with deposition of silica dust in the lung and onset of lung fibrosis has been one of the hot areas in the study of silicosis.This particular review focusses on the recent advances in the study of serum biomarkers for silicosis including inflammatory cytokines(tumor necrosis factor-α, interleukin-17, transforming growth factor-β1 and IL-12p40-containing cytokines, etc), miRNAs (miR-21, miR-200c, etc), serum enzymes (proline peptidase, heme oxygenase-1, superoxide dismutase, glutathione peroxidase and angiotensin-converting enzyme), immunoglobins and nephronectin, Clara cell protein 16, etc.There have been quite a lot of biomarkers being studied and some showed potential usefulness in the early detection and diagnosis of silicosis.Further improvement in the sensitivity and specificity of biomarkers and large scale multicenter validation are needed for the application in the future. Key words: Silicosis; MicroRNAs; Biomarker cytokines; Inflammatory cytokines; Enzyme