Staging research of human lung cancer tissues by high-resolution magic angle spinning proton nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (HRMAS 1 H NMR) and multivariate data analysis.

AIM: High-resolution magic-angle spinning proton nuclear magnetic resonance (HRMAS1 H NMR) spectroscopy technique was employed to analyze the metabonomic characterizations of lung cancer tissues in hope to identify potential diagnostic biomarkers for malignancy detection and staging research of lung tissues.

METHODS: HRMAS1 H NMR spectroscopy technique can rapidly provide important information for accurate diagnosis and staging of cancer tissues owing to its noninvasive nature and limited requirement for the samples, and thus has been acknowledged as an excellent tool to investigate tissue metabolism and provide a more realistic insight into the metabonomics of tissues when combined with multivariate data analysis (MVDA) such as component analysis and orthogonal partial least squares-discriminant analysis in particular.

RESULTS: HRMAS1 H NMR spectra displayed the metabonomic differences of 32 lung cancer tissues at the different stages from 32 patients. The significant changes (P < 0.05) of some important metabolites such as lipids, aspartate and choline-containing compounds in cancer tissues at the different stages had been identified. Furthermore, the combination of HRMAS1 H NMR spectroscopy and MVDA might potentially and precisely provided for a high sensitivity, specificity, prediction accuracy in the positive identification of the staging for the cancer tissues in contrast with the pathological data in clinic.

CONCLUSION: This study highlighted the potential of metabonomics in clinical settings so that the techniques might be further exploited for the diagnosis and staging prediction of lung cancer in future.