assessment of indirect hemagglutination and zymography procedures in evaluation of gelatinase a in patients with benign and malignant prostate hyperplasia

there are increasing data on novel tumor markers such as gelatinase a, which play a key role in tissue invasion and metastasis. since prostate cancer is one of the common malignancies, we designed a simple and applicable indi¬rect hemagglutination (iha) test for determination of total gelatinase a in se¬rum samples. in this study, we have analyzed the circulating form of gelatinase a (mmp-2) in patients suffering from either benign prostate hyperplasia (n= 54) or prostate cancer (n= 26) and normal individuals as control (n= 26). the gelatinolytic activity was determined by zymography followed by densitomet-ric analysis. psa was quantified by using a standard elisa technique. corre¬lation of densitometric analysis of gelatinase a activity and iha titer was sig¬nificant at 0.01 level (p< 0.01, r = 0.916). correlation of psa and iha titer was significant at 0.01 level (p< 0.01, r = 0.746). border line iha titer in patients with prostate cancer was 512 ± 1 tube titer, in benign prostate hyper¬plasia patients was 128 ± 1 tube titer, and the titer in normal individuals was 8 ± 1 tube titer. these results demonstrate that iha compared to zymography may be a better and simpler procedure in monitoring and screening patients with prostate cancer.