Circulating micrornas as biomarkers for hepatocellular carcinoma in egyptian patients with chronic hepatitis C virus infection / Suzan Mahrous Ali Elsheikh ; Supervised Abdelmonem Elsisy , Nahla Ali Fawzy Fayek , Nevien Ezz Eldein Elabd

Thesis (Ph.D.) - Cairo University - Faculty of Medicine - Department of Clinical and Chemical Pathology

Background: Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is reported to be the fifth most common cancer in men and the eighth common cancer in females with about 560,000 cases are discovered every year. MiRNAs are a set of small, single stranded, non coding RNA molecules that negatively regulate gene expression at the posttranscriptional level. Several miRNAs were found to be frequently deregulated in HCC and some specific miRNAs were found to be associated with the clinicopathological features of HCC. Objectives: The aim of this study was to detect the diagnostic and prognostic value of miRNA-122, miRNA-199a and miRNA-16 in serum of HCV induced HCC patients compared with chronic HCV patients without HCC and healthy control. Subjects and Methods: The current study analysed the expression of mature miRNA-122, miRNA-199a and miRNA-16 in serum by a singleplex TaqMan two step stem loop quantitative real-time reverse-transcription PCR (qRT-PCR) in 40 newly diagnosed HCC subjects, 40 chronic HCV liver cirrhosis without HCC and 20 apparently healthy subjects as a control group using RNU48 as a normalization control. Results: Serum miR-16 was statistically significantly lower in HCC patients than in the HCV patients (P= 0.033). The serum level of miR-199a in patients with HCV was statistically significantly lower than healthy controls (P= 0.001). Receiver operating curve (ROC) analysis for serum miRNA-16 for discriminating HCC patients from HCV patients showed that and at the cut-off value of 0.904, the sensitivity and specificity for this marker were 57.5% and 70%, respectively with area under the curve (AUC) was 0.638

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