Objective: MicroRNAs play important roles in the regulation of the initiation and progression of bladder cancer. To our best knowledge, the prognostic value of miR-576-3p in bladder cancer has not been reported. Thus, the purpose of the current study was to determine the expression of miR-576-3p and assess the clinical significance of miR-576-3p in bladder cancer.
Patients and methods: Quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) was performed to evaluate miR-576-3p levels in 232 pairs of bladder cancer specimens and adjacent noncancerous tissues. The association of miR-576-3p expression with clinicopathological factors was statistically analyzed. Overall survival was calculated and survival curves were plotted using the Kaplan-Meier method. The influence of each variable on survival was examined by the Cox multivariate regression analysis.
Results: Our data showed that the expression of miR-576-3p was significantly decreased in bladder cancer tissue compared with matched bladder tissues (p < 0.01). Low miR-576-3p expression level was significantly associated with advanced tumor stage (p = 0.004), lymph node metastasis (p = 0.027), and recurrence (p = 0.018). The results of Kaplan-Meier survival analysis showed that patients with low miR-576-3p expression presented shorter mean months of overall survival than patients with high miR-576-3p expression (p < 0.0001). Finally, the univariate and multivariate analysis showed that miR-576-3p expression was an independent prognostic marker of overall survival of bladder cancer patients.
Conclusions: Our results demonstrated that down expression of miR-576-3p in bladder cancer was associated with an unfavorable prognosis, and miR-576-3p might be clinically applicable as an indicator of favorable prognosis.