Inflammatory bowel diseases as an intermediate stage between normal and cancer: a FTIR-microspectroscopy approach.

Elucidation of the evolution of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) to cancer by clinical symptoms and histopathology of biopsies is important. Fourier transform infrared microspectroscopy (FTIR-MSP) has shown promise as a diagnostic tool for distinction of normal and cancer cells and tissues. In the present work, FTIR-MSP is used to evaluate IBD cases and to study the IR spectral characteristic with respect to cancer and normal tissues from formalin-fixed colonic biopsies from patients. Specific regions of the spectra were analyzed by statistical tools to study variations in metabolites that signified changes between the two pathological conditions: IBD and cancer. IBD tissues can be grouped with cancer or normal tissue using certain parameters such as phosphate content and RNA/DNA ratio as calculated from the spectra and show intermediate levels with regard to these metabolites. Further classification of the spectra by cluster analysis indicated which cases of Crohn's disease (3 of 10 cases) or ulcerative colitis (7 of 10 cases) were more likely to progress to cancer. The study exhibits that FTIR-MSP can detect gross biochemical changes in morphologically identical IBD and cancer tissues and suggest which cases of IBD may require further evaluation for carcinogenesis. Copyright 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.