Evaluation of DNA Damage in Patients with a Neuroendocrine Tumor

Objective: Neuroendocrine tumors develop from the neuroendocrine cells of the endocrine system. As these tumors are extremely slow growing compared with other cancers, they often take years to reach a measurable dimension, thus leading to the late diagnosis, which has adverse effects on the survival and quality of life of patients. There is a link between many types of cancer and genomic instability, thus the markers associated with genomic instability can be used for early diagnosis of the disease or cancer-related changes. Comet assay is the most commonly used method to test genomic instability or DNA damage. To the best of our knowledge, no data are available on DNA damage in patients with neuroendocrine tumors. This study aimed to investigate the possible risk of DNA damage in a patient with neuroendocrine tumors using the comet assay. Material and Methods: The study included 23 patients with neuroendocrine tumors and 20 age-and sex-matched healthy participants. The DNA damage was determined using the comet assay for leukocytes obtained from the peripheral blood samples of patients and control participants. Results: We found that the DNA damage was markedly higher in the patients with neuroendocrine tumors than control participants (p<0.05). Conclusion: Our data suggest that genomic instability contributes to the development of neuroendocrine tumors. However, further investigations are needed to support our results, as it is a preliminary report on DNA damage risk in patients with NETs.