Benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) and prostate cancer are the most frequently diagnosed conditions in men above 60 years. BPH manifests as benign enlargement of the prostate gland causing pain and difficulty in micturition, often associated with other lower urinary tract symptoms. On the other hand, prostate cancer might initially set in as a tumor of no clinical significance, but can ultimately develop into an aggressively metastatic cancer at later stages. Due to overlapping symptomatic manifestations with BPH, it might be difficult to diagnose prostate cancer and differentiate it from BPH. Screening for prostate cancer is based on examining the levels of prostate specific antigen (PSA), a clinical biomarker for prostate cancer in blood. However, several reported cases indicate that PSA might lack the sensitivity and specificity required to differentiate between the cancerous and benign conditions of prostate. Therefore, in the absence of non-invasive biomarkers in a diagnostic setup, an intensely invasive surgical removal of a part of the tissue and subsequent histopathologial examination is the only available procedure to confirm the cancer. In this study, we used tissue and urine proteomics platforms to profile respective proteomes in both clinical conditions. We observed that latent transforming growth factor binding protein was significantly under-expressed in the both tissue and urine proteome of prostate cancer. We propose that the down-regulation of the latent transforming growth factor binding protein 4 might be explored in a large set of patients with prostate cancer to develop a non-invasive urine based biomarker for the diagnosis of prostate cancer.

中文翻译：

---

前列腺癌的分子分析：基于前列腺组织和尿液蛋白质组学的方法

良性前列腺增生（BPH）和前列腺癌是60岁以上男性中最常被诊断出的疾病。BPH表现为前列腺的良性肿大，引起疼痛和排尿困难，通常与其他下尿路症状有关。另一方面，前列腺癌最初可能是没有临床意义的肿瘤，但最终可能在以后的阶段发展为侵袭性转移性癌症。由于BPH的症状表现重叠，可能难以诊断前列腺癌并将其与BPH区分。前列腺癌的筛查基于检查前列腺特异性抗原（PSA）的水平，PSA是血液中前列腺癌的临床生物标志物。然而，一些报道的病例表明PSA可能缺乏区分前列腺癌和良性疾病所需的敏感性和特异性。因此，在诊断设置中不存在非侵入性生物标志物的情况下，仅侵入性外科手术切除部分组织并随后进行组织病理学检查是确认癌症的唯一可用方法。在这项研究中，我们使用组织和尿液蛋白质组学平台在两种临床情况下分析各自的蛋白质组。我们观察到潜在的转化生长因子结合蛋白在前列腺癌的组织和尿液蛋白质组中均显着表达不足。