Significance of serum circRNA hsa_circ_0000437 in the auxiliary diagnosis and prognosis of gastric cancer / 中华检验医学杂志

ABSTRACT

Objective:To investigate the expression of hsa_circ_0000437 in the serum of patients with gastric cancer and its clinical value.Methods:The serum samples from 80 patients (57 males and 23 females) with pathologically confirmed gastric cancer (GC), 50 gastric benign disease (28 males and 22 females) and 80 healthy controls (46 males and 34 females) were collected from October 2018 to December 2020 in Affiliated Hospital of Nantong University.Serum samples from 35 of 80 gastric cancer patients after operation were collected. The expression of serum hsa_circ_0000437 was determined by real-time fluorescent quantitative PCR (RT-qPCR). Serum carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA), carbohydrate antigen 199 (CA 199) and carbohydrate antigen 724 (CA724) were determined by chemiluminescence method.Comparisons of serum hsa_circ_0000437 between groups were performed by Mann-Whitney U test.The correlation between serum expression of hsa_circ_0000437 in gastric cancer patients and its clinical pathological characteristics was performed by χ 2 test.Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve and the area under the curve of ROC (AUC) were used to evaluate their diagnosis efficiency. Kaplan-Meier survival curve analysis was used to analyze the relationship between the expression level of serum hsa_circ_0000437 and the prognosis of patients. Results:The relative expression of hsa_circ_0000437 in GC, gastric benign disease, healthy controls were 2.252 (1.235, 4.765), 1.598(1.139, 1.982) and 1.000 (0.818, 1.385) respectively.The relative expression of hsa_circ_0000437 in GC was significantly higher than that in gastric benign disease ( P<0.001) and healthy controls ( P<0.001). The difference between gastric benign disease and healthy controls was also statistically significant ( P<0.001).The differences of serum hsa_circ_0000437 expression in GC patients between T stage, N stage, and tumor differentiation were statistically significant. The AUC of hsa_circ_0000437, CEA, CA199 and CA724 in GC patients were 0.863, 0.619, 657 and 0.608 respectively compared with healthy controls. The AUC of above four-parameter panel was 0.892 and the sensitivity was up to 97.5% (78/80). Kaplan-Meier survival curve showed that the overall survival rate of patients with high serum hsa_circ_0000437 expression was significantly lower than that of patients with low expression ( P=0.008). Conclusion:Serum hsa_circ_0000437 could be a biomarker for the auxiliary diagnosis and prognosis of GC.