The expression of serum vascular endothelial growth factor in non-small cell lung cancer and its clinical significance

Objective:To explore the expression of serum vascular endothelial growth factor(VEGF) in non-small cell lung cancer(NSCLC) and its clinical significance.Methods:The levels of serum VEGF were measured by sandwich enzyme linked immunosorbent assay(ELISA) in 114 patients with non-small cell lung cancer and in 87 healthy subjects.Sensitivity,specificity,positive predictive value and negative predictive value of VEGF detection were calculated,respectively.The relationship between the pre-treatment levels of serum VEGF and their clinical effect,and between the positive expression number of three kinds tumor markers jointly and the therapeutic effect were analyzed respectively.Results:The serum VEGF levels in patients with non-small cell lung cancer were significantly higher than those of healthy subjects(P0.001);The levels of serum VEGF in patients with tumor burden were significantly higher than those in patients without tumor burden(P0.001).According to the highest value of medicine reference of VEGF(200.6ng/L),its sensitivity and specificity were 69.7% and 96.4%,respectively;There was a significant difference between the sensitivity of serum VEGF in patients with tumor burden(81.9%) and that in patients without tumor burden(33.7%)(P0.01).With the rising of the serum VEGF level,the patient's therapeutic effect gradually declined(P0.05).The combined analysis suggested that with the increasing of the positive number of serum tumor markers,the proportion of ineffective patients showed a growing trend.When the positive numbers of serum tumor markers reached 3,the treatment of about 87.5% patients showed ineffective.The level of serum VEGF was positively correlated with grade of differentiation and clinical pathological stage(P0.01),but not significantly correlated with age.Conclusion:VEGF played a very important role in the growth and metastasis of non-small cell lung cancer and may be a new tumor marker or an important index in the diagnosis of non-small cell lung cancer.