Increased expression of microRNA-150 is associated with poor prognosis in non-small cell lung cancer

Objectives: The aim was to evaluate the clinical significance and prognostic value of tissue miR-150 expression in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients. Materials and methods: Quantitative real-time PCR was used to analyze the expression of miR-150. Overall survival (OS) was estimated using the Kaplan-Meier method, and the differences in survival were compared using the log-rank test. A Cox proportional hazards model was used for multivariate analysis. Results: Mean miR-150 levels were significantly higher in NSCLC tissues compared with matched non-cancerous tissues (4.07 ± 2.33 vs. 1.00 ± 0.46, P < 0.0001). The level of miR-150 in NSCLC was strongly correlated with lymph node metastasis (P = 0.04), distant metastasis (P = 0.01) and clinical TNM stage (P = 0.02). Kaplan-Meier analysis showed that the cumulative 5-year OS rate was 40.8% in the high expression group, and 69.2% in the low expression group. The log-rank test showed that the OS rate of patients with high miR-150 expression was significantly poorer than that of the remaining cases (P = 0.007). Conclusion: Our data indicated that overexpression of miR-150 in NSCLC tissues has prognostic value.