The validity of salivary microRNAs (hsa-miR-200a, hsamiR-125a and hsa-miR-93)‎ as oral squamous cell carcinoma biomarker

الملخص EN

Background : Oral squamous cell carcinoma represents the vast majority of oral cancer it is a common malignant tumor with an increasing incidence.

Around the world, the 5 year mortality rate of oral cancer is about 50 %.

Thus novel biomarkers for early detection oral squamous cell carcinoma are needed.

The level of three salivary microRNAs namely hsa-miR-200a, hsa-miR-125a and hsa-miR-93 were measured in saliva of patients with oral squamous cell carcinoma and compared their levels in saliva of healthy control subjects to determine their potential as oral cancer biomarker.

Materials and methods : The level of these three microRNAs was measured by using revers transcription, preamplification and quantitative PCR.

Results : Only miR-200a present in a significantly lower level (p < 0.05) in the saliva of oral squamous cell carcinoma patients than in control.

miR-200a was the strongest parameter (most affected by disease status) in the context of differentiation between OSSC and healthy controls (having the highest ROC area of 0.781 which is significantly higher than the area associated with equivocal test).

Coming next in order of importance in the context of case-control differentiation was normalized CT values for hsa-miR-93, which has a reasonably high ROC (0.650), but failed to show statically significance differences, P > 0.05.

Conclusions : The detection of miRNAs in saliva can be used as noninvasive and rapid diagnostic tool for the diagnosis of oral cancer.