الفهرس | Only 14 pages are availabe for public view |
Abstract Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is concerned to be one of the most challenging malignancies with high incidence, prevalence and mortality rates worldwide. Egypt has a special situation because it has the highest prevalence of hepatitis C virus (HCV) infections in the world and HCV is considered the main cause of HCC. Most HCC patients do not receive curative therapy as a result of late diagnosis, where α-feto- protein (AFP)- the most widely used and broadly known biomarker for HCC- is not satisfactory. Now, the most urgent need is to find sensitive and specific markers for prediction to help in proper treatment for HCC. There is evidence for differences in miRNA expression patterns between different tissues and malignant conditions including HCC. Aim of the work: This study was conducted to detect the application of miR-615-5p in early prediction of HCC arising post-HCV infections. Subjects and methods: A total of 50 blood samples (10 samples from chronic hepatitis C, 15 samples from liver cirrhosis (LC) patients, 15 samples from HCC patients, and 10 controls) were collected. The level of the mature miRNA-615-5p expression was detected by real time quantitative PCR (RT-qPCR) in all samples. Besides, miR-615-5p levels in relation to laboratory parameters were explored. Results: We found that the expression of blood miR-615-5p was distinctly increased in liver cirrhosis and HCC compared with controls (mean ± SE: 5.32±0.02, P < 0.01 and mean ± SE: 5.55±0.02, P < 0.01, respectively). In addition, we conduct the ROC curve to detect the specificity, sensitivity and cutoff values of both miR-615-5p and AFP. The ROC curve analysis showed that, miR-615-5p might be a biomarker for HCC. Conclusion: Our results suggest that circulating miR-615-5p was a significant biomarker could be used to monitor the upregulation of HCC patients and due to the reasonable increase of its sensitivity and specificity than AFP, it might serve as a potential non-invasive predictive and diagnostic molecular biomarker for HCC. Key words: HCC, miR-615-5p, non-invasive markers, Egyptians |