Department of Clinical Pathology, Faculty of Medicine, Assiut University, Egypt.
Surgical oncology department, South Egypt cancer institute, Assiut University, Egypt.
Egypt J Immunol. 2021 Jul 1;28(3):127-137.
Breast cancer is one of the most malignant tumors in women across the globe. Diagnosis of breast cancer at early stages is essential to improve treatment outcomes and decrease mortality rates. There is a pressing need for new non-invasive biomarkers to improve early diagnosis of breast cancer. This study aims to assess plasma miR-27a for the early diagnosis of breast cancer. miR-27a was evaluated in a total of 95 blood samples, 40 newly diagnosed cancer patients, 20 patients with benign breast lesions, 20 females with positive family history for breast cancer and 15 apparently healthy controls, using quantitative real time polymerase chain reaction. Our results exhibited significantly higher expression level of plasma miR-27a in breast cancer patients (median= 8.3 and 19 fold change for early and late stages respectively) compared to controls, high risk group and benign group with (P <0.001) for each. Plasma miR-27a was significantly higher in late breast cancer (median=19 fold change) compared to early breast cancer (median= 8.3) with (P <0.001). There was no statistically significant difference of plasmamiR-27a levels in benign group (median=1.8 fold change) compared to both control group and high risk group. There was no statistically significant difference of plasma miR-27a levels in high risk group (median= 1.2 fold change) compared to control group (median= 1 fold change). We performed Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) analysis for discriminating malignant from non-malignant cases. Plasma miR-27a yielded an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.983 with sensitivity 97.5%, specificity 91% and accuracy 94%.We concluded that miR-27a expression level represents sensitive and specific non-invasive molecular biomarkers for diagnosis of breast cancer.
乳腺癌是全球女性中最恶性的肿瘤之一。早期诊断乳腺癌对于改善治疗效果和降低死亡率至关重要。因此，我们迫切需要新的非侵入性生物标志物来提高乳腺癌的早期诊断率。本研究旨在评估血浆 miR-27a 在乳腺癌早期诊断中的作用。我们使用实时定量聚合酶链反应（qRT-PCR）方法，在 95 份血样中评估了 miR-27a 的表达水平，其中包括 40 例新诊断的癌症患者、20 例良性乳腺病变患者、20 例有乳腺癌家族史的女性和 15 名健康对照者。我们的结果显示，与对照组、高风险组和良性组相比，乳腺癌患者血浆 miR-27a 的表达水平明显更高（早期和晚期分别为中位数 8.3 和 19 倍）（P<0.001）。晚期乳腺癌患者血浆 miR-27a 的表达水平明显高于早期乳腺癌患者（中位数 19 倍）（P<0.001）。良性组血浆 miR-27a 的表达水平与对照组和高风险组相比无统计学差异（中位数 1.8 倍）。高风险组血浆 miR-27a 的表达水平与对照组相比无统计学差异（中位数 1.2 倍）。我们进行了Receiver Operating Characteristic（ROC）分析，以区分恶性和非恶性病例。血浆 miR-27a 区分良恶性病例的曲线下面积（AUC）为 0.983，灵敏度为 97.5%，特异性为 91%，准确性为 94%。综上所述，miR-27a 的表达水平可作为乳腺癌诊断的敏感和特异的非侵入性分子标志物。
