The amino-acid balance in cancer patients often differs from that in healthy individuals, because of metabolic changes. This study investigated the use of plasma amino-acid profiles as a novel marker for screening non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients.

The amino-acid concentrations in venous blood samples from pre-treatment NSCLC patients (n=141), and age-matched, gender-matched, and smoking status-matched controls (n=423), were measured using liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry. The resultant study data set was subjected to multiple logistic regression analysis to identify amino acids related with NSCLC and construct the criteria for discriminating NSCLC patients from controls. A test data set derived from 162 patients and 3,917 controls was used to validate the stability of the constructed criteria.

The plasma amino-acid profiles significantly differed between the NSCLC patients and the controls. The obtained model (including alanine, valine, isoleucine, histidine, tryptophan and ornithine concentrations) performed well, with an area under the curve of the receiver-operator characteristic curve (ROC_AUC) of >0.8, and allowed NSCLC patients and controls to be discriminated regardless of disease stage or histological type.

This study shows that plasma amino acid profiling will be a potential screening tool for NSCLC.

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