Understanding demographic and clinical features of abdominal discomfort patients and the potential of serum miRNA-210 expression for the screening of colorectal cancer patients as fluid biopsy

Abstract

Colorectal cancer (CRC) has become one of the deadliest cancer all over the world because of its poor prognosis and high mortality rate. For CRC diagnosis, colonoscopy is considered as the most efficient method though it is an invasive process. Establishing blood biomarker as fluid biopsy can be a better option of colonoscopy. The present study was conducted to understand demographic and clinical features of abdominal discomfort patients and the potential of serum micro RNA 210 expression for the screening of colorectal cancer patients. In this study we have collected information about sociodemographic features (Age, sex, food habit, physical activity level, smoking and alcohol consumption, family history of cancer, daily sunlight exposure) of patients who comes to doctor with abdominal discomfort and were suggested to do colonoscopy. 52.4% of them were male and 47.6% were female. Mean age was 48±22 years. No significant association were noted within CRC with smoking and alcohol consumption. Almost 66% patients were physically inactive and 61.9% had sunlight exposure of about less than 30 min. They also had co-diseases such as IBD (35.7%) and diabetes (26.2%). Most common symptoms were abdominal pain and fatigue. After confirmed diagnosis, blood was collected from CRC patients (N=9) to know miRNA-210 expression in the serum, and then compared this expression with control group. As miRNA-210 is an oncogenic miRNA, its expression in CRC patients were 16 times higher than healthy individual and also increased gradually as the disease progressed to advanced stages. This expression was also negatively associated with patient’s serum vitamin D status. Higher vitamin D level in serum lower the expression of miRNA-210. In summary, our data suggests that circulating miRNA-210 has the potential to become a marker for fluid biopsy for CRC diagnosis.