non-invasive prostate cancer detection by measuring expression level of mir-21 and mir-214 in urine

Background: prostate cancer is the most prevalent cancer amongmenworldwide. diagnosis in this cancer is primarily done, using aggressive methods such as biopsy. laboratory methods, such as the measurement of prostate-specific antigen (psa) in the blood, do not have high sensitivity and specificity. micrornas (mirnas), a group of diagnostic biomarkers, can diagnose diseases such as cancer. microrna (mirna) is a small, non-coding, single-stranded rna with a length of 21 to 23 nucleotides. objectives: this study was designed to investigate the changes in the expression level of mir-21 and mir-214 in the urine of patients with prostate cancer compared with healthy controls. methods: a total of 70 urine samples from prostate cancer patients (32 metastatic and 38 non-metastatic) and 30 from healthy subjects with negative biopsy reports were collected. the expression level of mir-21 and mir-214 in the urine were detected by quantitative reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (qrt-pcr). results: mir-21 showed a significant increase in expression (p = 0.003) and mir-214 showed a significant decrease in expression (p = 0.000) compared with the control group. the specificity, sensitivity, and area under the curve (auc) were 100, 72.14, and 0.721% for combined panels of mir-21 and mir-214 and 63.33, 61.43, and 0.620%, respectively, for psa. conclusions: mir-21 and mir-214 showed significant change in expression in patients with prostate cancer compared with healthy subjects. it is hoped that, with further research, a combined panel of mir-21 and mir-214 can be used as a non-invasive method for detecting prostate cancer with higher sensitivity and specificity than the psa test.