title: Fucose: A biomarker in grading of oral cancer.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Early diagnosis of cancer helps a great deal in the management of oral cancer patients. Number of proteinous markers have been employed for this purpose. Majority of them are not specific. Recently conjugated oligosaccharide with proteins and lipids have gained considerable importance in the present postgenomics and postproteomic period in the diagnostic and prognostics of cancer cases.
  
  
  METHODS
  In this study, serum fucose levels were estimated in 50 control cases and 75 cases of oral cancer by the method of Dische and Shettles as adopted by Winzler.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Serum fucose levels were found to be significantly higher in oral cancer cases (46.63 ± 5.29 mg/dl) as compared to the control cases (7.22 ± 0.26 mg/dl). The stepwise elevated serum fucose levels were found to be correlated with the histopathological grading of oral cancer.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Estimation of such fucose conjugated proteins is suggestive to be good biomarkers in the diagnosis of oral cancer cases as well as in assessing the prognosis of such cases.
authors.affiliation: Department of Oral Medicine, Career Post Graduate Institute of Dental Sciences and Hospital, Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India.
authors.forename: Satish
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Kumar
authors.affiliation: Department of Biochemistry, Career Institute of Medical Sciences and Hospital, Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India.
authors.forename: Mona
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Saxena
authors.affiliation: Department of Oral Medicine, Career Post Graduate Institute of Dental Sciences and Hospital, Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India.
authors.forename: Kandakurtis
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Srinivas
authors.affiliation: Department of Biochemistry, Career Institute of Medical Sciences and Hospital, Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India.
authors.forename: Vinod Kumar
authors.initials: VK
authors.lastname: Singh
keywords: Fucosylation; oral cancer patients; prognosis; serum 6-deoxy-L-galactose