A multi-gene blood-based methylation assay for early diagnosis of colorectal cancer.

Background: Early detection for colorectal cancer (CRC) can enhance the patient prognosis. We aimed to validate the combined multi-gene detection in plasma of Methods: Overall, 124 participants including 45 CRC patients, 8 advanced adenoma patients, 34 small polyp patients, and 37 normal controls who underwent colonoscopy were enrolled. The carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) test and methylation tests for Results: The positive detection rate of multi-gene methylation in CRC patients was 86.67%, for stage I and stage II patients, the positive rates were 90.91% and 87.50%, both of which were significantly higher than CEA, which had rates of 55.56%, 18.18% and 56.25% for the corresponding stages. In patients with advanced adenomas and small polyps, the positive rates for the four-gene combined test were 62.50% and 52.94%, respectively, which were markedly higher than the CEA rates of 12.50% and 14.71%. AUC of the ROC curve indicated that the diagnostic value of the multi-gene test for CRC was superior to that of any single gene. Correlation analysis revealed that the positive rate of the test was not affected by patients' clinicopathological characteristics. Conclusions: A combination of methylated