Abstract
BACKGROUND: Increasing evidence demonstrated that circulating miRNAs could serve as meaningfully non-invasive and reliable biomarkers for the detection of various cancers. OBJECTIVE: To investigate the expression level of plasma miRNA-718 in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) patients and its diagnostic value. METHODS: Quantitative real time polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR) method was performed to examine the expression levels of plasma miRNA-718 in 120 consecutive ESCC patients and 51 healthy controls. The difference of plasma miRNA-718 expression level between the paired pre- and postoperative patients was compared. The correlation between plasma miRNA-718 expression levels and clinicopathological characteristics was further analyzed and the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis was performed to evaluate the diagnostic power of plasma miRNA-718 for ESCC. RESULTS: Plasma miRNA-718 expression level of ESCC patients was significantly lower than that of healthy controls. Compared with preoperative patients, the plasma miRNA-718 expression level of postoperative patients was significantly upregulated. Plasma miRNA-718 expression level was inversely correlated with the lymph node metastasis and TNM stage. The ROC curve analysis showed that plasma miRNA-718 yielded AUCs of 0.715, 0.689 and 0.620 for the detection of ESCC patients, early patients with Tis-T1 or early patients with TNM 0-I, respectively. CONCLUSION: Plasma miRNA-718 is downregulated in ESCC patients and might serve as a potential diagnostic marker for ESCC.