Long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) DSCAM-AS1 is upregulated in breast cancer

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Accumulating evidence highlights that long noncoding RNA (lncRNA) DSCAM-AS1 play a key regulatory role in different stages of cancer development and progression. This study aimed to investigate whether the expression of DSCAM-AS1 is deregulated in breast cancer. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The relative expression of DSCAM-AS1 was measured in fifty breast cancerous and matched adjacent non-neoplastic tissue samples using quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) technique. The association between DSCAM-AS1 expression and patients’ clinicopathological features was evaluated. Sensitivity and specificity of the DSCAM-AS1 expression for diagnosing breast cancer was obtained by the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis. RESULTS: Our results showed that the expression of DSCAM-AS1 was significantly up-regulated in breast cancerous tissues compared with the matched adjacent non-neoplastic tissues (P < 0.05). Furthermore, we observed a significant association between the DSCAM-AS1 expression and lymph node metastasis (P = 0.011) but no other clinicopathological characteristics (P > 0.05). ROC curve analysis resulted in an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.67 and showed that the DSCAM-AS1 expression level may discriminate cancerous and non-cancerous tissues with 68% sensitivity and 76% specificity. CONCLUSION: This study provides further evidence that the expression of DSCAM-AS1 is deregulated in breast cancer and highlights its potential in breast cancer development.