چكيده لاتين
Papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC) is the most common type of thyroid cancer. Despite its relatively favorable prognosis, one of the major challenges is lymph node metastasis, which can significantly affect treatment outcomes and patient survival. Molecular investigations and the identification of biomarkers associated with tumor initiation, progression, and metastasis can enhance early diagnosis, disease prognosis, and the development of targeted therapies.
The NUPR1 gene encodes a nuclear factor that regulates cellular stress responses, survival, and proliferation, and it has been implicated in various cancer types. NUPR1 exists in two variants, A and B, whose expression levels and roles in PTC have not been fully elucidated.
In this study, the expression of NUPR1 variants A and B was evaluated in different thyroid tissue samples, including healthy tissue, goiter, PTC tumors without lymph node metastasis (nPTC), and PTC tumors with lymph node metastasis (mPTC), using RT-qPCR. Additionally, the correlation between the expression of these variants and clinicopathological factors such as patient age and sex, tumor location, and tumor size was investigated.
Results showed that variant B exhibited significantly different expression levels across tissue types (p < 0.05), whereas variant A did not show significant variation (p > 0.05). Overall, variant B expression was markedly higher than variant A in all examined samples. Gender-based analysis revealed that variant B expression was significantly higher in females compared to males (p = 0.02), while variant A showed no significant difference between sexes (p = 0.12). Both variants demonstrated a significant increase in expression with advancing patient age. Furthermore, significant associations were found between variant expression levels and tumor location and size.
Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis demonstrated that variant B has a high ability to distinguish between healthy tissue and non-metastatic tumors (AUC = 0.8, p = 0.0029), goiter and non-metastatic tumors (AUC = 0.95, p < 0.0001), and non-metastatic versus metastatic tumors (AUC = 0.73, p = 0.04). In contrast, variant A did not show significant diagnostic performance among these tissue types (p > 0.05).
These findings suggest that NUPR1 variant B may serve as a valuable biomarker for the diagnosis, metastasis prediction, and severity assessment of papillary thyroid carcinoma.
