Roatoa I et al. - The in vitro assay for spontaneous osteoclastogenesis and serum IL-7 dosage could be useful for diagnostic purposes and it might be able to monitor cancer patients with a high risk to develop osteolytic metastases at follow-up, especially after a curative treatment. Methods
60 male pts affected by NSCLC, divided in early and advanced stage disease
Patients’ blood and urinary samples were collected at tumor diagnosis and at f/u
PBMCs were cultured to investigate the spontaneous osteoclastogenesis
IL-7 was dosed in serum and its quantitative gene expression was evaluated on tumor and healthy tissues by RQ-PCR
Results
Both at diagnosis and f/u, osteolytic bone pts showed high spontaneous osteoclastogenesis level vs non-bone metastatic and healthy controls
Presence of spontaneous osteoclastogenesis correlated with urinary crosslinks increase
Serum IL-7 levels were higher in bone metastatic pts than in pts w/o bone lesions and healthy controls
Serum IL-7 increase correlated with the osteoclastogenesis and on an increased IL-7 production by tumor cells
At f/u pts with increased osteoclastogenesis and serum IL-7 levels showed early secondary bone lesions
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