Noninvasive early diagnosis of laryngeal squamous cell carcinoma (LSCC) revealing the high-performance potential of the HOXD10 gene monomethylated locus: a case–control study

Laryngeal squamous cell carcinomas (LSCCs) was a frequent malignancy in upper aerodigestive tract. The lack of non-invasive biomarkers for early diagnosis has led to unfavorable prognosis. We firstly identified methylation biomarkers from TCGA and GEO databases. We further validated the diagnostic performance by utilizing blood samples obtained from 43 LSCCs and 50 normal controls (NCs). The HOXD10 cg10364040 was hypermethylated in tumors compared with NCs (P < 0.01), with an area under the curve (AUC) greater than 0.90 in each public database. In clinical validation phase, HOXD10 cg10364040 methylation was able to discriminate LSCCs from NCs with high accuracy (AUC = 0.767, sensitivity: 72.1%, specificity: 82.0%), and exhibited greater sensitivity (85.0%) and specificity (86.0%) in stage I patients than in NCs (AUC = 0.864). In summary, we firstly identified cg10364040 as a novel diagnosis biomarker of LSCC and confirmed it as a noninvasive biomarker in clinical.