Overexpression of long intergenic noncoding RNAs in bladder cancer: A new insight to cancer diagnosis

There is increasing evidence that show long noncoding RNAs including long intergenic noncoding RNAs (lincRNA) play a pivotal regulatory role in the biological processes. Differential expression of lincRNAs can be utilized for cancer diagnosis, prognosis, and targeted therapy. Little is known about their expressions in urothelial tumors. Concerning the potential role of lincRNAs in cancer development, we aimed to investigate the expression levels of LINC00958 and DNM3OS in bladder cancer. Fifty tumor and 50 adjacent non-tumor tissue samples along with their clinicopathological parameters were obtained from bladder cancer patients. Expressions of LINC00958 and DNM3OS were analyzed by Real-time PCR. ROC curve analysis was used to evaluate the diagnostic power of LINC0095 and DNM3OS for BC. Expression level of LINC00958 was considerably increased in cancerous tissues (P < 0.001) and in correlation with cigarette smoking (P = 0.043). DNM3OS expression was higher in the tumor tissues than normal tissues (P < 0.001) and showed a significant association with age (P = 0.038). By using the ROC curve, the diagnostic power of LINC00958 and DNM3OS transcript levels in bladder cancer were estimated to be 87% and 75%, respectively. Our findings offer some important intuitions into the oncogenic role of LINC00958 and DNM3OS in bladder cancer and suggest that they can be candidate biomarkers and may provide new approaches for the diagnosis and therapy if being validated in a larger sample size of clinical samples as well as functional studies.