ABSTRACT
Background: Breast cancer remains the most frequent type of cancer in females worldwide, with nearly 1.7 million new cases diagnosed in 2012. In Egypt, breast cancer is the most common malignancy among females accounting for 18.3% of total cancer cases in Egypt. Unfortunately, the traditional imaging techniques as well as the currently accepted markers such as serum CEA and CA 15.3 cannot adequately identify early stage patients. MiRNAs are a class of endogenous non-coding RNAs tilde 22 nucleotides in length, which regulate gene expression primarily at the post-transcriptional level and thus are involved in many cellular processes, such as cell proliferation, differentiation, and apoptosis. One of which is miRNA-21 and its alterations have been shown to play critical roles in breast cancer
Materials and Methods: This is a pilot retrospective case-control study. We quantified serum microRNA-21 expression levels using qRT-PCR in 30 breast cancer patients and another 10 controls in comparison to CA 15-3 as a conventional marker of breast cancer used in clinical practice
Results: MiRNA-21 expression levels in early diagnosis of breast cancer patients with a superior both sensitivity and specificity of 100% specially in comparison with CA 15.3 that displayed 70% sensitivity and 60% specificity
Conclusion: MiRNA-21 levels are significantly higher in breast cancer patients compared to healthy subjects. Furthermore, we found that increased miRNA-21 expression levels correlated with progression of breast cancer stages