A dramatic overexpression of miR-146a was observed in primary gastric tumors. miR-146a showed lower expression in progressed tumors with greater stages and lymph node metastasis.
The expression level of miR-146a in lymph node metastasis was significantly lower than that in non-lymph node metastasis (t=3.104, p=0.002). miR-146a may be involved in the development and progression of colon cancer.
The relative expression levels of miR-146a and miR-146b in cancerous tissues could be associated with the pathological type and presence or absence of lymph node metastasis (p<0.05).
The expression of miR-146a in advanced gastric cancer tissues was lower, compared with that in the adjacent non-tumor tissues, and was negatively correlated with lymph node metastasis (P<0.05).
We identified a four-miRNA panel (miR-501-3p, miR-143-3p, miR-451a, miR-146a) by multivariate logistic regression model that provided high predictive accuracy for LNM with an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.891 (95% CI, 0.840 to 0.930) in training set.
Our work provides evidence that miR-146a, miR-26a, miR-10b and miR-153 could be defined as biomarkers in triple negative breast cancer to predict lymph node metastases (LNM).
Positive associations were found between levels of miR-146a expression in PTC tissues and gender (female), cervical lymph node metastasis, multifocality, extra tyroidal invasion and advanced clinical TNM stages (III and IV).
Furthermore, we found that microRNA-146a density was positively correlated with apoptosis rates in H. pylori-positive gastric cancer tissues and intratumoral microRNA-146a density was negatively correlated with lymph node metastasis among H. pylori-positive gastric cancer patients.