Down-regulation of long non-coding RNA MEG3 serves as an unfavorable risk factor for survival of patients with breast cancer

J.-J. Zhang, S.-H. Guo, B.-Q. Jia

General Surgery Department II, Chinese PLA General Hospital, Beijing, China. jq352801@126.com

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• Oncology

OBJECTIVE: The downregulation of Long non-coding RNA MEG3 (MEG3) has been observed in breast cancer (BC). However, there is no previous study of the relationship between MEG3 and patient prognosis in BC. Accordingly, this study investigated the prognostic values of MEG3 in BC patients.

MATERIALS AND METHODS: we performed RT-qPCR to detect the expression of MEG3 in 207 paired BC tissues and adjacent noncancerous tissues. The association of MEG3 expression with clinicopathological factors or prognosis was statistically analyzed.

RESULTS: Our findings revealed that the MEG3 expression was significantly decreased in clinical BC tissues compared to adjacent normal tissues (p < 0.01). MEG3 level was significantly associated with differentiation grade (p  = 0.004), TNM stage (p  = 0.011) and lymph nodes metastasis (p  = 0.000). Using Kaplan-Meier analysis, we found that patients with low MEG3 expression had significantly poor overall survival (OS) rate (p  < 0.001) and progression-free survival (PFS)  rate (p  < 0.001). Moreover, multivariate Cox analysis revealed MEG3 expression was an independent poor prognostic factor for both 5-year OS (p  = 0.003) and 5-year PFS (p  = 0.002) in BC patients.

CONCLUSIONS: Our results indicated that MEG3 expression was an independent prognostic factor for patients with BC, which may serve as a novel biomarker in BC patients.

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