Patients with lung cancer who underwent surgery to remove solid tumors and who were treated with atrial natriuretic peptide (ANP) had significantly lower cancer recurrence than did untreated patients, according to a report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Investigators retrospectively evaluated patients with lung cancer who underwent surgical removal of tumors; 77 patients received perioperative treatment with ANP and 390 patients did not receive ANP treatment.
ANP-treated patients had significantly greater 2-year relapse-free survival (RFS) after surgery than did those who did not receive ANP (91% vs. 75%, P = .018). Analysis of propensity-matched patients also showed significantly greater 2-year RFS in the ANP group (91% vs. 67%, P = .0013), reported Dr. Takashi Nojiri of Osaka (Japan) University Graduate School of Medicine, and his associates.
“We demonstrated that cancer recurrence after curative surgery was significantly lower in ANP-treated patients than in control patients, suggesting that ANP could potentially be used to prevent cancer recurrence after surgery,” wrote Dr. Nojiri and colleagues (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 2015 March 16 [doi:10.1073/pnas.1417273112]).
Atrial natriuretic peptide is a vasodilating hormone from the human heart and acts as a diuretic; previous studies have shown that administration during the perioperative period reduces inflammatory responses and has a prophylactic effect on postoperative cardiopulmonary complications in lung cancer surgery.