ABSTRACT
Objective To evaluate the plasma level of miR-21 in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) patients and its clinical diagnostic significance .Methods Case-control study was used .The plasma level of miR-21 was measured by real-time quantitative PCR.The relative expressions of miR-21 were calculated. This study included 60 cases of patients with HCC , 71 patients with liver cirrhosis ( LC ) , 52 healthy volunteers ( HV) from January to June in 2014 in Henan Province People′s Hospital.The receiver operating characteristic ( ROC) curves were analyzed to determine the sensitivity and specificity of miR-21 expression levels in HCC diagnosis. Differences between groups were assessed by the t-test.Results Plasma microRNA-21 level in the 60 patients with hepatocellular carcinoma ( 2.6 ±1.1 ) was significantly higher than in patients with chronic hepatitis (1.6 ±0.9) and healthy volunteers (1.0 ±0.6) (t=5.322,P=0.004;t =8.349, P =0.000 3, respectively ) .Plasma microRNA-21 level in the HCC patients were positively correlated with tumor size and differentiation (tdif=3.366,P=0.019;tsize =3.490,P=0.012). ROC analysis of plasma microRNA-21 yielded an AUC of 0.796 with 70.0% sensitivity and 65.3%specificity when differentiating hepatocellular carcinoma from chronic hepatitis , and an AUC of 0.934 with 89.5% sensitivity and 81.8% specificity when differentiating hepatocellular carcinoma from healthy volunteers.Conclusion The plasma level of miR-21 in HCC patients has high specificity , and maybe help to diagnose of HCC.