Decreased levels of circulating sex hormones as a biomarker of lung cancer in male patients with solitary pulmonary nodules

Background: An early differentiation of malignant from benign solitary pulmonary nodules (SPNs) is essential for management and prognosis of lung cancer.Objectives: Here we investigated whether measurement of circulating sex hormones could be useful for an early detection of malignancy among patients with SPNs.Methods: We recruited 47 patients with malignant SPNs, 45 patients with benign SPNs, and 32 healthy persons. Testosterone, estradiol, and progesterone were measured. Carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) as well as TNF-α, IL-1 and IL-6 were also measured.Results: We found that sex hormones were decreased significantly in patients with malignant SPNs, as compared to patients with benign SPNs and healthy controls (P<0.05). Sex hormones levels showed a trend to decline in patients with benign SPNs as compared to normal controls, but the difference was not statistically significant (P>0.05). CEA levels were only abnormally elevated in eight patients with lung adenocarcinoma. The inflammatory cytokines were remarkably higher in both patients than in normal controls. However, there was no statistical difference in these cytokines among patients.Conclusions: The reduced sex hormones levels seemed to be uniquely associated with lung cancer. Therefore, measurement of sex hormones may have clinical potential in the diagnosis of malignancy in patients with SPNs.Keywords: solitary pulmonary nodules (SPNs), sex hormones, lung cancer, biomarker

Charge and spin fractionalization in strongly correlated topological insulators

We construct an effective topological Landau-Ginzburg theory that describes general SU(2) incompressible quantum liquids of strongly correlated particles in two spatial dimensions. This theory characterizes the fractionalization of quasiparticle quantum numbers and statistics in relation to the topological ground-state symmetries, and generalizes the Chern-Simons, BF and hierarchical effective gauge theories to an arbitrary representation of the SU(2) symmetry group. Our main focus are fractional topological insulators with time-reversal symmetry, which are treated as generalizations of the SU(2) quantum Hall effect.Comment: 8 pages, published versio