Diagnostic and prognostic value of circulating miR-18a in the plasma of patients with gastric cancer

Abstract

The aim of this manuscript is to analyze the diagnostic and prognostic value of circulating miR-18a in the plasma of patients with gastric cancer. In this study, 82 patients with gastric cancer and 65 healthy controls were enrolled in the study, and 10 ml of peripheral venous blood was collected for RNA extraction. miR-18a expression was determined using TaqMan quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction assay and was further correlated with patients' clinicopathological parameters and the follow-up data. The results indicated that plasma miR-18a was upregulated in gastric cancer patients compared with healthy controls (P < 0.001). miR-18a yielded an area under the receiver-operating characteristic curve of 0.907 with 80.5 % sensitivity and 84.6 % specificity in discriminating gastric cancer from healthy controls. Plasma miR-18a expression was significantly associated with pathological grade (P = 0.036) and lymph node status (P = 0.025), but not with tumor stage (P = 0.075). Both log-rank test and univariate Cox regression analysis showed that the higher miR-18a expression in plasma was associated with shorter disease-free survival and disease-specific survival of the patients with gastric cancer (P = 0.023 and P = 0.027; P = 0.036 and P = 0.043, respectively), which was also not proven by multivariate Cox regression analysis (P = 0.238 and P = 0.160, respectively). In conclusion, this study showed that miR-18a may be a promising biomarker for the detection of gastric cancer and its upregulation may be potentially associated with unfavorable prognosis of bladder cancer, suggesting that miR-18a might serve as a potential biological marker for further risk stratification in the management of gastric cancer.

A Comprehensive NGS Data Analysis of Differentially Regulated miRNAs, piRNAs, lncRNAs and sn/snoRNAs in Triple Negative Breast Cancer

“…Similarly, miR-183, a cluster (miR-96 and miR-182) of family genes, which is a potent prognostic marker for lung adenocarcinoma and other cancers, was found to be highly upregulated in our TNBC samples 21-27. Likewise, a well-known onco-miR miR-18a belongs to miR-17-92 cluster that consists of seven miRNAs (miR-17-5p, miR-17-3p, miR-18a, miR-19b, miR-20a and miR-92) 28 and is considered as a biomarker for several cancers, particularly, esophageal, nasopharyngeal, colorectal and gastric cancer 29-34. Another miR that was highly dysregulated in TNBC samples was miR-96.…”

Emerging Role of MicroRNAs as Liquid Biopsy Biomarkers in Gastrointestinal Cancers

“…A thorough review of literature on the diagnostic accuracy of miRNA biomarkers for gastric cancer revealed that miR-18a and miR-21 are among the leading candidates that deserve further interrogation and validation (34,35). Comprehensive RNA sequencing on 20 gastric cancers and healthy controls revealed a panel of miRNAs (miR-1, miR-20a, miR-27a, miR-34, and miR-423-5p) that can differentiate patients with gastric cancer from healthy controls (36).…”

MicroRNA-18a inhibits ovarian cancer growth via directly targeting TRIAP1 and IPMK

“…Meanwhile, the role of miR-18a in cancer development remains elusive. Several studies have observed that miR-18a is highly expressed in several types of cancer, including nasopharyngeal carcinoma (10), and prostate (11) and gastric (12,13) cancer. The miRNA promotes cancer development via inducing proliferation and inhibiting apoptosis.…”