Comment on “Diagnostic and prognostic significance of long noncoding RNA LINC00173 in patients with melanoma”

Abstract

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Dear Editor,We were very pleased to read the article entitled "Diagnostic and prognostic significance of long noncoding RNA LINC00173 in patients with melanoma" by Wang et al. 1 In this study, the authors revealed that LINC00173 expression was abnormally elevated in melanoma and may serve as a novel biomarker for predicting diagnosis and clinical progression of melanoma patients. However, some concerns need to be raised from our opinion.The main problem of the study was that it lacks general demographic information, inclusion criteria, and exclusion criteria. There are some factors that affect the prognosis of the melanoma, including size of tumor, status of lymph node, distant metastasis, and complication. Inclusion and exclusion criteria should also be provided. Some chronic diseases such as hypertension and diabetes that affect prognosis should be excluded.Another concern is that the definition of high expression for LINC00173 was not provided. In this study, 163 melanoma tissues and their pair-matched nontumor specimens were obtained from patients who underwent radical resections at The First People's Hospital of Jinan City from May 2012 to July 2015. LINC00173 was first reported in 2017 2 . Therefore, we can assume that the researchers used frozen samples for the experiment. It is not clear whether freezing storage of general samples would lead to RNA degradation, and whether the researchers considered the effect of freezing time on RNA levels.