[Expression and Prognostic Significance of MYCN in Adult Patients with Newly Diagnosed Acute Myeloid Leukemia]

This study aimed to determine the expression levels and prognostic significance of MYCN in bone marrow of adult patients with newly diagnosed acute myeloid leukemia (AML).

A total of 62 newly diagnosed patients with non-M3 AML were enrolled as the study group, and 20 healthy donors as the control group. Real-time quantitative reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (PCR) was performed to detect the expression level of MYCN, and the relationship between MYCN expression and prognosis of AML patients was analyzed.

MYCN was up-regulated in newly diagnosed AML patients compared with normal controls (P < 0.001). Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis revealed that MYCN could serve as a diagnostic biomarker for AML. Kaplan-Meier survival analysis showed that the patients with high MYCN expression had a shorter overall survival (OS) time than the patients with low MYCN expression (P =0.016). The expression level of MYCN was lower during the complete ressimion (CR) phase of AML compared to the initial diagnosis, but it returned to the initial diagnostic level or even higher during relapse phase. Multivariate Cox regression analysis showed that high expression of MYCN was an independent risk factor for OS of AML patients (P =0.021).

MYCN is highly expressed and associated with poor prognosis in de novo AML, which might be serve as a novel diagnostic and prognostic biomarker for adult AML.