Estrogen metabolites for the diagnosis of schistosomiasis associated urinary bladder cancer.

In a recent issue of Cancer Letters Gouveia and colleagues [1] studied a series of 40 Angolan patients diagnosed with urogenital schistosomiasis (UGS). They reported that 45% of them presented UGS-associated squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) and/or urothelial cell carcinoma [1]. In addition these authors performed Liquid Chromatography-mass spectrometry and this analysis revealed numerous estrogen like metabolites. These schistosome infection-associated metabolites included catechol estrogen quinones (CEQ) and CEQ-DNA-adducts, two of which had been identified previously in S. haematobium [1,2,3]. They conclude suggesting that these metabolites can be expected to provide deeper insights into the carcinogenesis UGS-induced bladder cancer, and as biomarkers for diagnosis and/or prognosis of this neglected tropical disease-linked cancer.