article · BMC Cancer
Ovarian cancer often lacks reliable non-invasive biomarkers with high sensitivity and specificity. Circulating cell-free DNA was investigated as a potential tool for both diagnosis and prognosis in a study involving 150 individuals, divided equally among malignant ovarian cancer cases, benign ovarian lesions, and healthy controls. Analysis showed substantially higher average levels of circulating cell-free DNA in patients with malignant cancer compared to those with benign conditions or healthy participants. Statistical assessments demonstrated that measuring these DNA fragments reliably distinguished ovarian cancer from benign conditions and healthy tissue. Furthermore, cell-free DNA levels strongly correlated with advanced cancer stages, tumour grade, and patient survival rates. Because it independently predicted both progression-free survival and overall survival, circulating cell-free DNA shows strong promise as a clinical biomarker for identifying ovarian cancer and guiding risk stratification and individualised treatment decisions.
Ovarian cancer remains difficult to detect early due to the absence of dependable, non-invasive diagnostic tests. Identifying circulating cell-free DNA in blood offers a route to detecting malignancies earlier, assessing tumour severity, and predicting patient outcomes. This could allow clinicians to make more informed treatment choices, potentially directing more intensive therapies to patients with higher-risk disease profiles.
The findings could enable the development of non-invasive blood-based diagnostic and prognostic assays for oncology clinics and pathology laboratories. Such tests could assist oncologists with early detection, risk stratification, and personalised therapy planning. Given that the evidence is based on an initial case-control study using real-time PCR, the technology is at an applied and tested stage, requiring larger clinical trials and assay validation before diagnostic market entry.
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Due to a lack of efficient screening methods or trustworthy biomarkers with high sensitivity and specificity, ovarian cancer (OC) is a quarrelsome disease with a high death rate. Investigators believe that circulating tumor cell-free DNA (cfDNA) can provide crucial clues concerning both primary and metastatic OCs. Our goal was to identify the potential of circulating cfDNA as a non-invasive biomarker for ovarian cancer. This case‒control prospective study was carried out on 150 participants, of whom 50 patients were confirmed to have ovarian cancer, 50 patients had benign ovarian lesions, and 50 participants were controls. For OC patients, medical, laboratory, and imaging evaluations together with survival analysis were performed. Quantification of cfDNA was done by real-time PCR. A distinct difference in the mean cfDNA was observed in the malignant group (11.84 ng/mL) compared to the benign (3.90 ng/mL) and control (0.23 ng/mL) groups. ROC curve analysis revealed that cfDNA had the highest value as a strong discriminatory marker for prediction of ovarian cancer in suspected cases and prediction of late stage and is a reasonable predictor of mortality (AUC 0.934, p < 0.001, 95% CI: 0.881–0.986; AUC 0.993, p < 0.001, 95% CI: 0.978–1.0; and AUC 0.814, p = 0.001, 95% CI: 0.690–0.937). The multivariate logistic regression reinforces its independent prognostic value for progression-free survival and overall survival. Our results indicate that cfDNA has a strong correlation with tumor grade and predictive capability in Cox models, suggesting that it may serve as a diagnostic and prognostic biomarker for OC. In clinical setting, these findings support the use of cfDNA in OC risk stratification and treatment planning, potentially enabling aggressive therapies for patients with high cfDNA expression.
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DOI: 10.1186/s12885-026-15967-7
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