Plasma microRNA might as a potential biomarker for hepatocellular carcinoma and chronic liver disease screening

Our study aims to investigate the expression signature of plasma microRNA-106b (miRNA-106b, miR-106b) in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) patients and chronic liver disease (CLD) patients compared with healthy controls and further evaluate the potential clinical value of miR-106b as biomarker in HCC detection. In addition, a meta-analysis was conducted to assess the diagnostic performance of miR-106a/b as a biochemical marker for cancer screening. This study was divided into two phases. In the first phase, the expression levels of plasma miR-106b obtained from 108 subjects (47 HCC patients, 25 CLD patients, and 36 healthy controls) were measured by using qRT-PCR. Areas under receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves (AUCs) were used to evaluate the diagnostic accuracy of plasma miR-106. In the second phase, a meta-analysis based on 11 previous researches as well as our current study was conducted to assess the potential clinical value of miR-106 in cancer detection. Plasma levels of miR-106b in HCC patients were significantly higher compared with CLD patients and healthy individuals. ROC curves suggested that plasma miR-106b yielded relative high sensitivities and specificities in differentiating HCC patients from CLD patients or healthy controls with corresponding AUC values of 0.726 and 0.879, respectively. In addition, miR-106b showed a relatively high accuracy in distinguishing CLD patients from healthy controls with its AUC value of 0.703. Furthermore, the meta-analysis for diagnostic performance of miR-106a/b showed a pooled sensitivity of 0.74, specificity of 0.75, and an AUC of 0.81. Subgroup analysis based on samples types revealed a higher diagnostic performance of miR-106 for cancer detection by using non-blood samples. Similarly, miR-106 as biomarker showed a higher diagnostic accuracy for gastric cancer detection. We found that plasma miR-106b has clinical value in the detection of HCC from healthy people and CLD patients. Further large-scale study may be needed to validate our findings.