الفهرس 
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Abstract
Chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) is a lethal hematological malignancy associated with a specific genetic lesion, the Philadelphia chromosome, harboring the BCR-ABL oncogene.
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small noncoding molecules that unlike their small size play an important role in gene expression at post- translational levels. MiRNAs expression play a vital role in the pathology of leukemia, where they were shown to be associated with tumor development, progression and response to therapy, suggesting their possible use as diagnostic, prognostic and predictive biomarkers thus miRNAs have rapidly emerged as potential targets for therapy.
In CML, abnormal expression of several miRNAs has been described, one of them is miR-181a. MiR-181a was found to act as tumor suppressor gene or oncogenic gene according to type of cancer. Role of miR-181a in CML remains elusive and poorly understood. Studies showed that miR-181a as a tumor suppressor gene, targets the Ras related protein Ral-A (RalA) which is a downstream molecule of BCR-ABL in Ras signaling pathway which plays a vital role in CML.
The current study aimed to assess expression of miR-181a in CML patients and if there is significant difference between its expressions in CML patients compared to normal control. The study enrolled 30 CML patients and 30 healthy volunteers served as control group. CML was diagnosed according to the clinical and laboratory criteria proposed by the World Health Organization (2016). The relative expression of miR-181a was measured by highly standardized one step RTq-PCR system normalized to reference gene (U6) and subsequently the 2-ΔΔct method was applied.
According to this study, the expression level of miR-181a was significantly lower than normal controls where most of CML patients (90%) were down-regulated compared with healthy control group.
On analyzing clinical and laboratory characteristic of disease, this study shows that hemoglobin and total leukocytes count with average percentage of basophils and eosinophils were significantly higher in CML patients versus control group. While lymphocytes average percentage was significantly lower in patients than those in the control group. Majority of patients were in chronic phase, also all patients showed splenomegaly.
Phases of the disease (chronic and accelerated) showed positive correlation with miR-181a expression level. On the other side, no correlations were observed between expression of miR-181a demographic, clinical characteristics and the received drugs of treatment.