Abstract
Prostate cancer is the fifth leading cause of male cancer mortality and poses a serious threat to men's health worldwide. PSA testing is widely used in prostate cancer screening, but its high false-positive rate leads to unnecessarily high subsequent testing costs, mental anguish and potential physical harm to patients. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop a convenient, cost-effective and non-invasive diagnostic method to assist in reducing the false-positive rate of PSA screening. The aim of this study was to evaluate the diagnostic value of serum MicroRNA expression in patients with prostate cancer. We selected 10 miRNAs in the literature that were associated with prostate cancer. Afterwards, we measured the expression levels of these miRNAs in serum of 112 prostate cancer patients and healthy controls through a training phase and a validation phase. By plotting receiver operating characteristic curve, the miRNAs with the highest diagnosis value were chosen. Then, a set of miRNAs with the top diagnostic value was identified using stepwise logistic regression. The findings showed that 5 kinds of miRNAs (let-7b-5p, miR-15a-5p, miR-133a-3p, miR-15b-5p, miR-144-3p) were abnormally expressed in the serum of prostate cancer patients. The diagnostic panel constructed with these 3 miRNAs including let-7b-5p, miR-15a-5p miR-15b-5p and which have high specificity and sensitivity in detecting prostate cancer (area under the curve (AUC) = 0.899). Our study illustrates the potential of a three-microRNA panel in the diagnosis of prostate cancer, which can help in the early detection of prostate cancer and may even assist in reducing the false-positive rate of PSA screening.