Is there a role for fatty acid synthase in the diagnosis of prostatic adenocarcinoma?: A comparison with AMACR.

Abstract

Our aim was to compare the usefulness of fatty acid synthase (FASn) with that of α-methylacyl coenzyme-A racemase (AMACR) in the diagnosis of prostatic adenocarcinoma. The expression of these 2 markers was compared in a tissue microarray containing 62 foci of benign glands and 36 foci of prostatic adenocarcinoma. Similar to AMACR, there was significantly higher FASn expression in adenocarcinoma compared with that in benign glands. The optimal accuracy rate and area under curve (AUC) by receiver operating characteristic analysis for FASn were not significantly different from those for AMACR (accuracy, 80% vs 87%; AUC, 0.942 vs 0.956; P for both, > .05). Moreover, in cases with coexistent malignant and benign glands on the same core, FASn could selectively distinguish a proportion of cases (17/21 [81%]) similar to using AMACR. We conclude that FASn may aid in the diagnosis of prostatic adenocarcinoma, at least to supplement AMACR as another positive marker of carcinoma and potentially increase diagnostic accuracy.