Association of miR-18a, miR-21and miR-92a with colorectal carcinoma in a cohort of Egyptian patients / Menatallah Mohamed Saleh Elaguizy ; Supervised Ahmed Alsayed Altaweel , Marwa Mohamed Sheta , Ahmed Mostafa Ahmed

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

Background: Colorectal cancer (CRC) is a major cause of cancer-related death worldwide. miRNAs have been demonstrated to play an important role in carcinogenesis either by oncogenic or tumor suppressor function. The aim of the present work is to study the serum levels of MiR-21, MiR-92a and MiR-18a to evaluate their potential use as biomarkers of CRC and to correlate their serum levels with the clinicopathological features to detect the prognostic potential of these miRNAs in patients with CRC. Subjects and methods: This study was conducted on 50 patients with CRC and 50 age and sex matched healthy volunteers used as a control group. Determination of the serum relative expression of each of three mature MiRNAs (MiR-21, MiR-92a and MiR-18a) was done after normalization to MiR-16 using the 2-xxCT method. Results: MiR-18a, MiR-21 and MiR-92a were found to be significantly up-regulated in serum of CRC patients (p<0.001, <0.001 and 0.003 respectively) compared to the healthy control group. ROC curve analyses demonstrated areas under the curve (AUC) of 0.906 [95% confidence interval (CI), 0.848{u2011}0.964], with 84% for both sensitivity and specificity for miR-18a, AUC=0.918 [95% CI, 0.866{u2011}0.971], with 84% sensitivity and 90% specificity for miR-21 and AUC=0.672 for miR-92a. Conclusions: MiR{u2011}18a and/or miR{u2011}21 could be helpful biomarkers while serum miR-92a has limited usefulness as a sole biomarker in CRC diagnosis. Combined serum miR-18a and miR-21 showed the highest sensitivity and specificity

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