INVESTIGATION OF THE EXPRESSION LEVEL OF MIR-195 AS A POTENTIAL BIOMARKER IN THE PLASMA OF GASTRIC CANCER PATIENTS IN GUILAN PROVINCE

Gastric cancer is one of the five most common cancers in Iran, the sixth most common cancer in the world, and the second cause of cancer-related death worldwide. Failure to diagnose gastric cancer in early stages suggests the need to find potential biomarkers. This study aimed to evaluate the miR-195 expression as a potential biomarker in the plasma of gastric cancer patients in Guilan province.

In this case-control study, the Q-RT-PCR method was used to evaluate the expression level of miR-195 in the plasma of 25 patients with gastric cancer and 25 normal individuals. The relationship between the expression level of miR-195 and clinicopathologic features was evaluated using the ANOVA test. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) and area under the curve (AUC) were used to evaluate the miR-195 as a potential biomarker to discriminate cancerous from non-cancerous states of the samples.

Our analysis showed that miR-195 was significantly downregulated in gastric cancer patients compared to the normal individuals (p˂0.05). The AUC value of ROC analysis was 0.7325±0.008 (p=0.0119) with the sensitivity of 51.7% and specificity of 71.8%.

Downregulation of miR-195 in gastric cancer patients and ROC analysis suggested that miR-195 can be introduced as a potential biomarker in the diagnosis of gastric cancer in Guilan province.