Early detection and accurate discrimination of pancreatic cancer from chronic inflammation are major clinical problems. In our article (1), we evaluated diagnostic performance of serum metabolomics based on gas chromatography mass spectrometry, and we concluded that our model possessed higher accuracy than conventional tumor markers in detecting the patients with resectable pancreatic cancer in cohort including patients with chronic pancreatitis.
In the Letter noted by Shakour and colleagues, the sample size in resectable pancreatic cancer was not enough to carry out stringent subgroup analyses. We also referred to the problems in our original article (1), and we described that there is a possibility that potential biases and insufficient study size of this study might raise the false significant results. To overcome the problems, development of the rigorous standard method and quality control procedures for the biomarker study are needed strongly.
In our study, we revealed the possibility of the serum metabolomics as the novel candidate screening method for pancreatic cancer. We consider our findings (1) to be the important data to start the large-scale studies. Now, we are planning the large-scale unbiased metabolomic study using sera obtained from the patients with various types of diseases including pancreatic cancer, and this study will be carried out based on closely supervised procedures.
See the original Letter to the Editor, p. 1921
Disclosure of Potential Conflicts of Interest
No potential conflicts of interest were disclosed.