A 3-microRNA scoring system for prognostication in de novo acute myeloid leukemia patients

Leukemia. 2015 May;29(5):1051-9. doi: 10.1038/leu.2014.333. Epub 2014 Nov 27.

Abstract

As a highly heterogeneous disease, acute myeloid leukemia (AML) needs fine risk stratification to get an optimal outcome of patients. MicroRNAs have florid biological functions and have critical roles in the pathogenesis and prognosis in AML. Expression levels of some single microRNAs are influential for prognosis, but a system integrating several together and considering the weight of each should be more powerful. We thus analyzed the clinical, genetic and microRNA profiling data of 138 de novo AML patients of our institute. By multivariate analysis, we identified that high expression of hsa-miR-9-5p and hsa-miR-155-5p were independent poor prognostic factors, whereas that of hsa-miR-203 had a trend to be a favorable factor. We constructed a scoring system from expression of these three microRNAs by considering the weight of each. The scores correlated with distinct clinical and biological features and outperformed single microRNA expression in prognostication. In both ours and another validation cohort, higher scores were associated with shorter overall survival, independent of other well-known prognostic factors. By analyzing the mRNA expression profiles, we sorted out several cancer-related pathways highly correlated with the microRNA prognostic signature. We conclude that this 3-microRNA scoring system is simple and powerful for risk stratification of de novo AML patients.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Adolescent
  • Adult
  • Aged
  • Aged, 80 and over
  • Chromosome Aberrations
  • Cohort Studies
  • Cytogenetics
  • DNA Mutational Analysis
  • Female
  • Gene Expression Profiling
  • Gene Expression Regulation, Leukemic*
  • Humans
  • Leukemia, Myeloid, Acute / diagnosis*
  • Leukemia, Myeloid, Acute / metabolism
  • Male
  • MicroRNAs / metabolism*
  • Microarray Analysis
  • Middle Aged
  • Multivariate Analysis
  • Prognosis
  • Proportional Hazards Models
  • Real-Time Polymerase Chain Reaction
  • Regression Analysis
  • Young Adult

Substances

  • MIRN155 microRNA, human
  • MIRN203 microRNA, human
  • MicroRNAs