Cholecystokinin as a potent diagnostic marker for gastric cancer

There is no early diagnosis marker for gastric cancer even though the gastric cancer is the second cause of deaths in East Asia. The aim of the current research is to develop a new diagnostic marker of gastric cancer. Commercially available ELISA kits were used to evaluate the peptide levels in plasma collected from Korean healthy and gastric cancer patients. About 1.5 fold decreased plasma cholecystokinin levels were measured in gastric cancer patients (n=75) than in healthy controls (n=36). Plasma cholecystokinin has no age, sex, and disease-dependent variation in control and patients sample. Receiver-operating characteristic curve analysis assessing the performance of cholecystokinin levels as the sensitivity of 94.7% and specificity of 100 % compared to healthy controls. These findings suggest plasma cholecystokinin as a useful biomarker for diagnosis of gastric cancer.