Serum osteocalcin (BGP) in tumor-associated hypercalcemia

Abstract

Serum osteocalcin (BGP) is a new marker of bone turnover that reportedly evaluates bone formation. Thus, its measurement could assess the bone formation rate in tumor-associated hypercalcemia. We measured concentrations of BGP and other parameters of bone metabolism in 54 untreated hypercalcemic cancer patients as compared to 109 healthy subjects. Primary tumor sites were breast (19), lung (11), head and neck (6), multiple myeloma (3), kidney (2), and various (11) or multiple (2). Mean BGP levels were higher in the hypercalcemic subjects, 4.6 ± 0.4 (SEM) ng/ml, than in the normal subjects, 3.6 + 0.1 ng/ml (p < .05), and were normalized in the 22 patients who could be reevaluated after successful treatment of hypercalcemia with intravenous aminohydroxypropylidene diphosphonate (APD). There was no correlation of BGP levels with age, sex, or renal function. Compared with the Gaussian distribution in the normal subjects, there was a considerable scatter of the data in hypercalcemic patients, suggesting the existence of defined subgroups with abnormally low or abnormally high values. However, we found no significant relationship of BGP concentrations with tumor site or histology or with bone metastatic involvement. We found also no significant correlation between concentrations of serum BGP and total or ionized calcium, alkaline phosphatase, parameters of bone resorption, and indices of parathyroid function. In summary, serum BGP levels were slightly elevated in tumor-associated hypercalcemia and were normalized after successful treatment of hypercalcemia. More importantly, BGP concentrations varied widely even in the subgroups of patients with hypercalcemia accompanying massive bone metastatic involvement or in the patients without detectable skeletal metastases. Thus, BGP determination cannot help to differentiate between paraneoplastic hypercalcemia and hypercalcemia due to metastatic bone lysis; moreover, our findings suggest great variability of the bone formation rate in tumor-associated hypercalcemia, whether bone metastases are present or not.