Gastric cancer (GC) is one of the common malignant tumors with high mortality. The abundance of miRNAs in serum exosomes has proved to have a high application value as a new noninvasive diagnostic method. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether serum exosomal miR-92a-3p could be used as a new biomarker for early diagnosis of GC and evaluate its clinical application value by detecting the expression of serum exosomal miR-92a-3p in 131 patients with primary GC and 122 healthy controls by real-time quantitative (qRT)-PCR. The results showed that the expression level of serum exosomal miR-92a-3p in GC patients was significantly lower than that in normal controls (p < 0.0001). In addition, the level was closely correlated with lymph node metastasis and tumor node metastasis stage of GC patients. The area under the curve for serum exosomal miR-92a-3p was 0.829, significantly higher than for other indicators. Furthermore, combined detection of serum exosomal miR-92a-3p, CEA and CA19-9 was more sensitive than any of the three alone or any pair. These results showed that serum exosomal miR-92a-3p could be used as a novel new tumor biomarker to improve diagnostic efficiency in GC.
Keywords: biomarker; diagnosis; exosomes; gastric cancer; miR-92a-3p.