MiR-576-3p is a novel marker correlated with poor clinical outcome in bladder cancer

MicroRNAs play important roles in the regulation of the initiation and progression of bladder cancer. To our best knowledge, the prognostic value of miR-576-3p in bladder cancer has not been reported. Thus, the purpose of the current study was to determine the expression of miR-576-3p and assess the clinical significance of miR-576-3p in bladder cancer.

Quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) was performed to evaluate miR-576-3p levels in 232 pairs of bladder cancer specimens and adjacent noncancerous tissues. The association of miR-576-3p expression with clinicopathological factors was statistically analyzed. Overall survival was calculated and survival curves were plotted using the Kaplan-Meier method. The influence of each variable on survival was examined by the Cox multivariate regression analysis.

Our data showed that the expression of miR-576-3p was significantly decreased in bladder cancer tissue compared with matched bladder tissues (p < 0.01). Low miR-576-3p expression level was significantly associated with advanced tumor stage (p = 0.004), lymph node metastasis (p = 0.027), and recurrence (p = 0.018). The results of Kaplan-Meier survival analysis showed that patients with low miR-576-3p expression presented shorter mean months of overall survival than patients with high miR-576-3p expression (p < 0.0001). Finally, the univariate and multivariate analysis showed that miR-576-3p expression was an independent prognostic marker of overall survival of bladder cancer patients.

Our results demonstrated that down expression of miR-576-3p in bladder cancer was associated with an unfavorable prognosis, and miR-576-3p might be clinically applicable as an indicator of favorable prognosis.