Objective: miR-329-3p has been reported to serve as a tumor suppressor in the progression of cervical cancer (CC). The aim of this study was to investigate the clinical significance of miR-329-3p in human CC.
Patients and methods: Quantitative RT-PCR (qRT-PCR) was used to detect miR-329-3p expression in CC tissue samples and matched normal cervical tissues. The x2 test was used to analyze the association between miR-329-3p expression and clinical features of CC patients. Moreover, we evaluated the prognostic value of miR-329-3p by Kaplan-Meier survival curve and Cox regression model.
Results: We found that the mean expression level of miR-329-3p in CC tissues was significantly lower than the mean level in the adjacent normal tissues samples (p < 0.01). MiR-329-3p level was significantly associated with lymph node metastasis (p = 0.013), FIGO stage (p = 0.024) and distant metastasis (p = 0.001). Furthermore, a significant difference was found, that CC patients with low miR-329-3p expression level had distinctly shorter overall survival than patients with high miR-329-3p expression level (p = 0.001). Finally, multivariate analyses indicated that miR-329-3p represented an independent predictor for overall survival of CC (p = 0.04).
Conclusions: These results indicated, for the first time, that down-regulation of miR-329-3p was associated with poor prognosis in CC patients. MiR-329-3p can be used as an independent factor to predict survival of patients with CC.