Expression of serum exosomal miR-23b-3p in non-small cell lung cancer and its diagnostic efficacy

The present study aimed to investigate the expression of serum exosomal miR-23b-3p in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and to determine its diagnostic efficacy for NSCLC. From October, 2017 to October, 2019, 80 patients with NSCLC, 60 patients with pneumonia and 30 healthy subjects undergoing physical examination were enrolled at the People's Hospital of Yangzhong City. Serum samples were collected from the 3 groups of patients. The expression of miR-23b-3p in exosomes was detected by RT-qPCR. The Chi-squared test was used to analyze the expression level of miR-23b-3p in exosomes, and the patients with NSCLC were divided into 2 groups according to the expression level. The association between the patient clinicopathological parameters and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves was used to evaluate the diagnostic efficacy of serum exosomal miR-23b-3p in NSCLC. The expression level of serum exosomal miR-23b-3p in the patients with NSCLC was significantly higher than that in patients with pneumonia (t=10.332, P<0.001) and healthy subjects (t=12.810, P<0.001); serum exosomal miR-23b-3p was significantly associated with tumor size, depth of invasion, liver metastasis and TNM stage (P<0.05). The area under the curve (AUC) for miR-23b-3p was 0.915 (95% CI, 0.84-0.92), the optimal relative expression of miR-23b-3p was 3.46, the sensitivity of diagnosis was 87.4%, and the specificity was 93.8%, all higher than that of carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA). The ROC^AUC of NSCLC was 0.645 (95% CI, 0.641-0.772) and for Cyfra21-1 it was 0.745 (95% CI, 0.701-0.812). Compared with the patients with pneumonia and the healthy subjects, the patients with NSCLC exhibited a higher level of serum exosomal miR-23b-3p. On the whole, these findings indicate that miR-23b-3p has a higher clinical diagnostic efficacy and may thus be a potential biomarker for the early diagnosis of NSCLC.