Colorectal cancer (CRC) remains one of the most important causes of cancer-related mortality worldwide, underscoring the need to better understand systemic inflammatory pathways across the colorectal neoplasia spectrum. In this exploratory case–control study, we characterized plasma levels of key inflammatory mediators in healthy individuals and patients with colorectal polyps or CRC. Healthy controls (n = 10), patients with colorectal polyps (CP, n = 16), early-onset CRC (EO-CRC, n = 11), and late-onset CRC (LO-CRC, n = 51) were prospectively enrolled. Plasma levels of sTNF-R, total TNF-α, PDGF-AA, IL-17A, and IL-1β were measured by ELISA. Group comparisons used Kruskal–Wallis tests with epsilon-squared effect sizes. PDGF-AA showed the strongest differences between controls and all neoplastic groups (ε2 ≥ 0.15), and these comparisons remained significant after Benjamini–Hochberg false discovery rate correction. IL-17A levels were slightly higher in EO-CRC than in LO-CRC; however, this difference did not remain significant after adjustment for multiple testing. TNF-α and IL-1β showed no significant differences across groups. Overall, this study primarily provides descriptive and hypothesis-generating evidence of differential inflammatory patterns across colorectal neoplasia, with PDGF-AA emerging as the most robust signal in this exploratory dataset. These findings do not support immediate diagnostic application and require validation in larger, prospectively recruited cohorts.
IONESCU et al. (Fri,) studied this question.