Abstract
Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer related morbidity and mortality worldwide. Currently, the vast majority of lung cancers are diagnosed at a late stage, when patients become symptomatic leading to dismal, less than 15% five-year survival rates. Evidence has demonstrated that screening computed tomography scans can be used to detect lung cancer, but these scans have high false positive rates. Therefore, there is a continued need for the development of minimally-invasive methods to screen the high risk population and diagnose lung cancer at an earlier, curable stage. One such promising area is the use micro-RNAs. These are short, non-coding RNA molecules that have been shown in previous research to be dysregulated in cancers. This review will focus on the potential use of miRNA levels in various biological fluids (whole blood, plasma, serum, and sputum) and demonstrate their potential utility as screening and diagnostic biomarkers for lung cancer. Current research will be analyzed and compared, and future directions in establishing the use of miRNAs for detecting lung cancer will be discussed.
Highlights
Lung cancer is the leading cause of morbidity and mortality associated with malignancies worldwide, with rates increasing in the past decade due to aging, pollution, and increased voluntary or involuntary consumption of various carcinogens [1,2,3]
Studies examining the use of chest radiographs to screen for lung cancer demonstrated unacceptably low sensitivity, such as in the National Lung Screening Trial (NLST) looking at screening via computed tomography (CT) scans in the high risk population
This study demonstrated that high risk individuals undergoing screening via CT scans have a 20% reduction in lung cancer related mortality [6]
Summary
Lung cancer is the leading cause of morbidity and mortality associated with malignancies worldwide, with rates increasing in the past decade due to aging, pollution, and increased voluntary or involuntary consumption of various carcinogens [1,2,3]. Patients with lung cancer are largely asymptomatic which results in the high rate of diagnosis when curative treatments are mostly ineffective. Approximately 75% of lung cancers are diagnosed at locally advanced or metastatic stages (stage III/IV) resulting in a less than 15% 5-year survival rate [2,4,5]. A cheap and reproducible test with the sensitivity of a screening test and the specificity of a diagnostic test has not yet been achieved. Development of such a test would assist patients in detecting their cancer earlier so they could receive treatment as soon as possible and increase their survival rates
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