Serum α-l-fucosidase activities are significantly increased in patients with preeclampsia.

Fucosylated glycans are essential molecules that facilitate signal transductions in several signal pathways and play important roles in development, inflammation, infection, and tumor metastasis. The fucosylated glycans are difficult to be developed into clinical biomarkers due to their complicated structures, but the decreased or increased activities of serum α-l-fucosidase, the lysosomal enzyme required for fucosylated glycan degradation, are diagnostic biomarker for patients with fucosidosis and hepatocellular carcinoma, respectively. However, the relationship between serum α-l-fucosidase activities and other human diseases is largely unknown. By taking advantage of the serum α-l-fucosidase activity data collected in the clinical laboratory of our hospital during the past 5 years, the serum α-l-fucosidase activities from 188,077 patients with 64 clinically defined diseases were compared to that of healthy controls (9519) with at least 30 data sets for each type of disease. Based on the mean, median, and -Log₁₀p values, we found that patients with preeclampsia, liver cancer, hepatitis, psoriasis, and multiple myeloma had serum α-l-fucosidase activities higher, while patients with Wilms' tumor, breast cancer, hepatic encephalopathy, or postbreast surgery had comparable activities to that of healthy controls. Unexpectedly, patients with the rest of 36 diseases had the statistically lower levels of serum α-l-fucosidase activities compared to that of healthy controls. Moreover, patients with uremia, azotemia, myeloproliferative disorder, and Alzheimer's disease had lowest median levels of serum α-l-fucosidase activities among the 64 diseases studied. Taken together, our data showed that serum α-l-fucosidase activities are not only useful for liver cancer diagnosis but also valuable indicators for different types of human diseases.

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