Potential Diagnostic Value of Plasma Long-Chain Non-Coding RNA HIT in Breast Cancer

The current study aims to investigate the expression of HOXA transcript induced by transforming growth factor-β (TGF-β) (HIT) in plasma of women with breast cancer and its potential diagnostic value for breast cancer.

qRT-PCR was used to detect the expression of HIT in breast cancer tissues and the plasma of patients with breast cancer. The correlation between the expression of HIT in plasma and clinicopathological parameters of breast cancer was analyzed. The levels of CAl53 and CEA in plasma were also detected. Operating characteristic (ROC) curve was drawn to evaluate the diagnostic efficacy of plasma HIT for breast cancer.

Compared with the adjacent tissues, the expression of HIT in breast cancer tissues was significantly increased. Meanwhile, the level of plasma HIT in the breast cancer group was significantly higher than that in the benign lesion group and healthy control group. The level of plasma HIT expression in breast cancer patients was correlated with estrogen receptor (ER) erbB-2 and lymph node metastasis (p < 0.05); the area under ROC curve (AUC) of plasma HIT in diagnosis of breast cancer alone was 0.827 with the sensitivity and specificity of 57.7% and 86.4%. The diagnostic efficacy of HIT, was significantly higher than that of CAl53 and CEA, and the combined diagnostic value of HIT, CAl53 and CEA was also higher than that of any single detection.

High expression of HIT in plasma may be a potential biomarker for the diagnosis of breast cancer.