Study of expression levels and clinical significance of miR-503 and miR-375 in patients with esophageal squamous cell carcinoma.

OBJECTIVE: This study aims to investigate the expression levels and clinical significance of miR-503 and miR-375 in patients with esophageal squamous cell carcinoma. PATIENTS AND METHODS: 40 cases of cancer tissues and adjacent tissues in patients with esophageal squamous cell carcinoma were collected from March 2017 to September 2017 in the Department of Gastroenterology in the First Affiliated Hospital of Henan Polytechnic University. qRT-PCR was used to analyze the expressions of miR-503 and miR-375 in cancer tissues and adjacent normal tissues. The association between their expressions and the gender, age, degree of tumor differentiation, TNM staging, presence or absence of lymph node metastasis, and other clinicopathological characteristics of patients with esophageal squamous cell carcinoma was analyzed. RESULTS: The results showed that the expression level of miR-503 in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma tissues (6.83±2.14) was significantly higher than that in adjacent tissues (2.45±1.13). The expression level of miR-375 in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma tissues (3.75±1.06) was significantly lower than that in adjacent tissues (7.45±1.13). The expression levels of miR-503 and miR-375 in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma were related to the existence of lymph node metastasis, degree of differentiation of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma and TNM staging (p<0.001). There was no correlation between the expressions of miR-503 and miR-375 and the age, gender and tumor size of patients (p>0.05). CONCLUSIONS: miR-503 was highly expressed in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma and miR-375 was lowly expressed in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma. miR-503 and miR-375 were closely related to the lymphatic metastasis, degree of differentiation and TNM staging of the tumor.