Clinical and epidemiological data suggest
coronary artery disease shares etiology with
prostate cancer (PCa). The aim of this work was to assess the effects of several
serum markers reported in
cardiovascular disease on PCa.
Serum markers (
oxidized low-density lipoprotein [
ox-LDL],
apolipoprotein [apo] B100, and
apoB48) in peripheral blood samples from 50 patients from Fudan University Shanghai
Cancer Center (FUSCC) with localized or lymph node metastatic PCa were investigated in this study. Twenty-five samples from normal individuals were set as controls. We first conducted
enzyme-linked
immunosorbent assay analysis to select candidate markers that were significantly different between these patients and controls. Then, the clinical relevance between OLR1 (the
ox-LDL receptor) expression and PCa was analyzed in The
Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) cohort. We also investigated the function of
ox-LDL in PCa cell lines in vitro. Phosphorylation
protein chips were used to analyze cell signaling pathways in
ox-LDL-treated PC-3 cells. The
ox-LDL level was found to be significantly correlated with N stage of
prostate cancer. OLR1 expression was correlated with
lymph node metastasis in the TCGA cohort. In vitro,
ox-LDL stimulated the proliferation, migration, and invasion of LNCaP and PC-3 in a dose-dependent manner. The results of
phosphoprotein microarray illustrated that
ox-LDL could influence multiple signaling pathways of PC-3. Activation of proliferation promoting signaling pathways (including β-
catenin, cMyc, NF-κB, STAT1, STAT3) as well as apoptosis-associating signaling pathways (including p27,
caspase-3) demonstrated that
ox-LDL had complicated effects on
prostate cancer. Increased serum
ox-LDL level and OLR1 expression may indicate advanced-stage PCa and
lymph node metastasis. Moreover,
ox-LDL could stimulate PCa proliferation, migration, and invasion in vitro.