Research Article Urine Cell-Free DNA Integrity as a Marker for Early Prostate Cancer Diagnosis: A Pilot Study

Copyright © 2013 Valentina Casadio et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Circulating cell-free DNA has been recognized as an accurate marker for the diagnosis of prostate cancer, whereas the role of urine cell-free DNA (UCF DNA) has never been evaluated in this setting. It is known that normal apoptotic cells produce highly fragmented DNAwhile cancer cells release longer DNA.We thus verified the potential role of UCFDNA integrity for early prostate cancer diagnosis. UCF DNAwas isolated from 29 prostate cancer patients and 25 healthy volunteers. Sequences longer than 250 bp (c-Myc, BCAS1, andHER2) were quantified by real-time PCR to verify UCFDNA integrity. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis revealed an area under the curve of 0.7959 (95%CI 0.6729–0.9188). At the best cut-off value of 0.04 ng