Department of Biological Sciences, University of Texas at El Paso, El Paso, TX 79968, USA.
Border Biomedical Research Center, University of Texas at El Paso, El Paso, TX 79968, USA.
Cells. 2022 Aug 7;11(15):2448. doi: 10.3390/cells11152448.
Annually, more than a million individuals are diagnosed with gastrointestinal (GI) cancers worldwide. With the advancements in radio- and chemotherapy and surgery, the survival rates for GI cancer patients have improved in recent years. However, the prognosis for advanced-stage GI cancers remains poor. Site-specific GI cancers share a few common risk factors; however, they are largely distinct in their etiologies and descriptive epidemiologic profiles. A large number of mutations or copy number changes associated with carcinogenesis are commonly found in noncoding DNA regions, which transcribe several noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs) that are implicated to regulate cancer initiation, metastasis, and drug resistance. In this review, we summarize the regulatory functions of ncRNAs in GI cancer development, progression, chemoresistance, and health disparities. We also highlight the potential roles of ncRNAs as therapeutic targets and biomarkers, mainly focusing on their ethnicity-/race-specific prognostic value, and discuss the prospects of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) to investigate the contribution of ncRNAs in GI tumorigenesis.
每年，全球有超过 100 万人被诊断患有胃肠道（GI）癌症。随着放射和化学疗法以及手术的进步，近年来 GI 癌症患者的生存率有所提高。然而，晚期 GI 癌症的预后仍然很差。特定部位的 GI 癌症有一些共同的危险因素；然而，它们在病因和描述性流行病学特征上有很大的不同。大量与癌变相关的突变或拷贝数变化通常发生在非编码 DNA 区域，这些区域转录出几种非编码 RNA（ncRNA），这些 RNA 被认为可以调节癌症的发生、转移和耐药性。在这篇综述中，我们总结了 ncRNA 在 GI 癌症发生、发展、化疗耐药性和健康差异中的调节功能。我们还强调了 ncRNA 作为治疗靶点和生物标志物的潜在作用，主要集中在它们的种族/种族特异性预后价值上，并讨论了全基因组关联研究（GWAS）的前景，以研究 ncRNA 在 GI 肿瘤发生中的作用。
