Down-regulation of microRNA-200b is a potential prognostic marker of lung cancer in southern-central Chinese population.

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) may regulate diverse biological processes and play an important role in cancer. And MiRNAs have been proposed as a useful tool for lung cancer diagnosis and therapeutics in cancer. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the association among the expression level of mature miR-200b-5p in peripheral blood and the risk of lung cancer and clinic pathological characteristics. This case-control study included 24 patients with lung cancer and 12 healthy controls. MiR-200b expression was deleted using real-time PCR. and the miR-200b expression of normal controls was significantly higher than that in lung cancer patients (1732.13 pg/mL vs 881.67 pg/mL, P < 0.05), no difference with age, sex, tissue type and clinical stage of lung cancer patients (P > 0.05). Furthermore, miR-200b expression level fluctuated with tumor progression in lung cancer, and there was highly significant for clinical stage II compared with the clinical stage III (P < 0.05). In addition, the down-regulation of miR-200b showed a highly discriminative receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve profile, clearly distinguishing cancer patients from cancer-free subjects with an area under the ROC curve (AUROC) of 0.87. The detection of miR-200b expression yielded 83.30% sensitivity and 100.00% specificity in the diagnosis of lung cancer. Therefore, these findings suggested that miR-200b may be used as a marker for the detection and diagnosis of lung cancer in peripheral blood.