الفهرس 
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Abstract
Hepatocellular carcinoma is one of the most common and aggressive malignancies in the world. AFP has been the most widely used plasma marker for diagnosis, surveillance and as a prognostic indicator of HCC patients’ survival.
AFP is a routinely used diagnostic biomarker for HCC, but its sensitivity is only 39-65% at the frequently-used cut-off 20 ng/ml, the unsatisfactory sensitivity limited the utilization of AFP as a screening biomarker for early diagnosis of HCC, So new biomarkers for early diagnosis is needed.
Conventional tests of hepatic function don‘t distinguish HCC from other hepatic masses or from cirrhosis. Accordingly, they contribute little to the diagnosis of the tumor. Diagnosis of HCC depends mainly on the detection of tumor markers in HCC patients in addition to other diagnostic modalities such as Triphaic CT and liver histopathology by biopsy.
Another potential biomarker for HCC is (TGF-β1), TGF-β1 inhibits hepatocyte proliferation, but it also promotes HCC. TGF-β1 has been shown to play both tumor-suppressive at early stage and tumor promoting roles at later stage.
At the early stage of tumorogenesis, TGF-β1 inhibited normal cell growth and tumorogenesis by suppressing G1/S phase transition, in later stages; malignant cells become resistant to suppressive effects of TGF-β1 either through mutation and/or functional inactivation of TGF-β1 receptors or by downstream alterations in the SMAD signaling pathway.
In the liver cancer, TGF-β1 is known to function as a promoter of fibrosis, an immune modulator, a tumor suppressor and also as a tumor promoter.
The aim of this study is to evaluate TGF-β1 as a diagnostic marker for the diagnosis of early HCC in comparison with alpha feto protein alone.