Diagnostic value of long non-coding RNA H19, UCA1, and HOTAIR as promising biomarkers in human bladder cancer

Aim: Currently, there are no satisfactory markers for bladder cancer available in clinics. In this study, we selected 3 long noncoding RNAs, H19, UCA1, and HOTAIR, to assess their diagnostic value in bladder cancer screening.

Method: In this research, a total of 96 cancer tissues and paired non-cancer tissues from patients with bladder cancer (BC) were collected. Total RNA was isolated from tissues using TRIzol reagent and performance of three selected lncRNAs as cancer markers were analyzed by reverse transcription-PCR. A new lncRNA-based score was conducted by Logistic regression model. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves and area under the ROC curve (AUC) was generated to assess the diagnostic values of the lncRNAs.

Result: Expression levels of lncRNAs H19, UCA1 and HOTAIR were remarkably increased in bladder cancer tissues compared with those in normal tissues (all P<0.001). The AUC (95% CI) of H19, UCA1, and HOTAIR were 0.717 (0.647-0.779), 0.787 (0.722-0.843), 0.713 (0.643-0.776), respectively. We conducted a new score named lncRNA-score, based on three selected LncRNAs: Lnc-Score =0.48*H19+0.49*UCA1+1.2*HOTAIR, which had the best diagnosability performance with AUC of 0.870 (0.814-0.914), sensitivity of 70.8%, specificity of 88.5%, +LR of 3.67 and -LR of 0.22.

Conclusion: The 3 selected lncRNAs were remarkably increased in bladder cancer tissues and have great potential to be new sensitive, reliable biomarkers for diagnosis of bladder cancer.