Correlation of plasma GDF15 with aging, organ disfunction, sarcopenia, and postoperative infectious complication in patients with esophageal cancer.
Authors: Yohei Ozawa, Hiroshi Okamoto, Yusuke Taniyama, Chiaki Sato, Hirotaka Ishida, Takaaki Abe, Takashi Kamei
Journal: Journal of Clinical Oncology (2024)

e16088 Background: The age of cancer incidence is increasing every year. Along with it, cancer patients getting has more comorbidity and decreasing muscle strength which may lead to increase postoperative complications. Especially, since esophageal cancer (EC) patients have heavy drinking and smoking history and high age of morbidity, they usually have multiple comorbidities and so that they particularly have high incidence of cachexia. A novel inflammatory marker known as growth differentiation factor 15 (GDF15) has been recently reported relation with cancer cachexia. This study conducted to evaluate correlation between clinical data which suggested cachexia of EC patients and plasma GDF15. Methods: Eighty-one esophageal cancer patients who first visited our outpatient ward from July 2021 to March 2023 were enrolled in this study. After obtaining consent for the study, plasma samples collected before starting any treatment for the cancer. The quantification of GDF15 was performed by ELISA. Clinical information was collected from clinical record including age, comorbidities, biochemical data, Controlling Nutritional Status (CONUT) score, and Skeletal Mass Index (SMI). GDF15 was then evaluated for clinical impact by comparison with postoperative results. Mann-Whitney U test, student-t test, ANOVA were used appropriately to analyze the relationship between the GDF-15 and patient characteristics and post operative complications. Multivariate analysis ware used logistic regression analysis. P-values &lt; 0.05 were considered statistically significant for all statistical analyses. Results: Mean age was 68.3-year-old and 80.3% of these were male. Malnutrition patients diagnosed by using CONUT were 24 (29.6%) and sarcopenia patients diagnosed by using SMI were 21 (25.9%). The median value of GDF15 was 1165 pg/mL with its range were from 298 to 9100 pg/mL. Plasma GDF15 was statistically correlated with age ( P&lt; 0.001), performance status ( P= 0.046), prevalence of hypertension ( P= 0.045) and/or diabetes ( P= 0.018), serum level of aspartate aminotransferase (AST) ( P&lt; 0.001)/ γ-glutamyltransferase (γ-GTP) ( P&lt; 0.001)/ creatinine ( P= 0.004)/ blood sugar ( P= 0.028), and SMI ( P= 0.003). Seventy-two patients underwent curative surgery, and no perioperative death was observed. The patients who occurred anastomotic leakage and infectious complication observed statistically higher GDF15 than those without (P = 0.030, P = 0.016). Optimal cut-off value was detected as 940 ng/mL for detecting infectious complication by ROC-curve with AUC value of 0.68. Conclusions: This study showed GDF15 is potentially suggesting deterioration of general condition, which came from aging, organ disfunction, and decreasing muscle mass, which may lead to cachexia in EC patients. In addition, higher GDF15 patients have risk of postoperative infectious complication.