Chengfeng Xiong, Gengming Cai, Junjia Zhang, Yunxia Lv
Department of Thyroid Surgery, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Nanchang University, Nanchang, China.
Department of Otolaryngology-Head Neck Surgery, First Affiliated Hospital of Quanzhou, Fujian Medical University, Quanzhou, Fujian, China.
J Cell Biochem. 2019 Oct;120(10):17050-17058. doi: 10.1002/jcb.28966. Epub 2019 May 17.
Papillary thyroid cancer (PTC) accounts for the majority of malignant thyroid tumors. Recently, several microRNA (miRNA) expression profiling studies have used bioinformatics to suggest miRNA signatures as potential prognostic biomarkers in various malignancies. However, a prognostic miRNA biomarker has not yet been established for PTC. The aim of the present study was to identify miRNAs with prognostic value for the overall survival (OS) of patients with PTC by analyzing high-throughput miRNA data and their associated clinical characteristics downloaded from The Cancer Genome Atlas database. From our dataset, 150 differentially expressed miRNAs were identified between tumor and nontumor samples; of these miRNAs, 118 were upregulated and 32 were downregulated. Among the 150 differentially expressed miRNAs, a four miRNA signature was identified that reliably predicts OS in patients with PTC. This miRNA signature was able to classify patients into a high-risk group and a low-risk group with a significant difference in OS (P < .01). The prognostic value of the signature was validated in a testing set ( P < .01). The four miRNA signature was an independent prognostic predictor according to the multivariate analysis and demonstrated good performance in predicting 5-year disease survival with an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve area under the curve (AUC) score of 0.886. Thus, this signature may serve as a novel biomarker for predicting the survival of patients with PTC.
甲状腺乳头状癌（PTC）占甲状腺恶性肿瘤的大多数。最近，几项微小RNA（miRNA）表达谱研究利用生物信息学提出，miRNA特征可作为各种恶性肿瘤潜在的预后生物标志物。然而，PTC尚未建立预后性miRNA生物标志物。本研究的目的是通过分析从癌症基因组图谱数据库下载的高通量miRNA数据及其相关临床特征，确定对PTC患者总生存期（OS）具有预后价值的miRNA。从我们的数据集中，在肿瘤和非肿瘤样本之间鉴定出150个差异表达的miRNA；其中，118个上调，32个下调。在这150个差异表达的miRNA中，鉴定出一个四miRNA特征，可可靠地预测PTC患者的OS。该miRNA特征能够将患者分为高风险组和低风险组，两组的OS有显著差异（P < .01）。该特征的预后价值在一个测试集中得到验证（P < .01）。根据多变量分析，四miRNA特征是一个独立的预后预测指标，在预测5年疾病生存率方面表现良好，受试者工作特征曲线下面积（AUC）得分为0.886。因此，该特征可作为预测PTC患者生存的一种新型生物标志物。
