Down-regulation of miR-5702 is associated with clinical progression and poor prognosis in patients with non-small-cell lung cancer

OBJECTIVE: Significant down-regulation of miR-5702 and its tumor-suppressive roles in non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) have been reported previously. However, its clinical significance in NSCLC has not yet been reported. In this study, we aimed to identify the prognostic value of miR-5702 in NSCLC patients. PATIENTS AND METHODS: The expression levels of miR-5702 were detected by Real-time quantitative polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR). The chi-square test was used for the examination of relationship between miR-5702 expression and clinicopathologic factors. The association between miR-5702 expression and overall survival in patients with NSCLC was statistically analyzed by Kaplan-Meier. Finally, univariate and multivariate models were conducted to determine the prognostic value of miR-5702 in NSCLC patients. RESULTS: MiR-5702 expression was lowly expressed in NSCLC tissue specimens compared with adjacent nontumor tissue (p < 0.01). It was observed that low expression of miR-5702 was associated with clinical stages (p = 0.029), lymph node metastasis (p = 0.016) and distant metastasis (p = 0.004). Moreover, Kaplan-Meier assay showed that patients with lower miR-5702 expression had worse overall survival time than that with higher miR-5702 expression (p = 0.0097). Finally, multivariate analysis showed that low expression of miR-5702 was independently associated with overall survival of NSCLC patients (HR = 3.128; 95 % CI: 1.237-5.668, p = 0.005). CONCLUSIONS: Our data, for the first time, indicated that miR-5702 expression may be considered as a prognostic biomarker in NSCLC patients.