Relevance of emerging metabolomics-based biomarkers of prostate cancer: a systematic review

Prostate cancer (PC) presents great challenges in early diagnosis and often leads to unnecessary invasive procedures as well as over diagnosis and treatment, thus highlighting the need for promising early diagnostic biomarkers. The aim of this review is to provide an up-to-date summary of chronologically existing metabolomics PC biomarkers, their potential to improve clinical PC diagnosis and to reduce the proliferation and monitoring of PC. The systematic research was conducted on PubMed in accordance with PRISMA guidelines to report PC biomarkers. The majority of the studies distinguished malignant from benign prostate and few explored the biomarkers associated with the progression of PC. The present review summarises the primary outcomes of most significant studies to extend our knowledge of PC metabolomics biomarkers. We observed divergent inter-laboratory technical procedures employing different statistical approaches produced abundant information regarding PC metabolites perturbation. Since PC metabolomics is still in its early phase, it is vital that we dig out the most specific, sensitive and accurate metabolic signatures and conduct more studies with milestone findings with comparable sample sizes to validate and corroborate the findings.

Automated summary

Prostate cancer presents challenges in early diagnosis and treatment, and there is a need for promising early diagnostic biomarkers. This review summarizes the existing metabolomics biomarkers for prostate cancer and evaluates their potential in clinical diagnosis and monitoring. The study finds that there are significant differences in technical procedures and statistical approaches between laboratories, and further validation is needed.