High expression of miR-214 is associated with a worse disease-specific survival of the triple-negative breast cancer patients

BACKGROUND: Hereditary triple-negative breast cancer patients have better recurrence-free survival than triple-negative sporadic ones. High expression of some of the miRNAs is related to worse overall and disease-free survival of triple-negative breast cancer patients. The attempt to associate expression level of some miRNA in triple-negative hereditary and sporadic breast cancers to disease specific survival was performed in this study. MATERIAL AND METHODS: Study group was made of 18 triple-negative breast cancer patients harboring the BRCA1 gene mutations and 32 triple-negative sporadic breast cancer patients. Quantitative amount of mir-10b, mir-21, mir-29a, mir-31, and mir-214 by real-time PCR was assessed. The disease-specific survival in relation of high and low levels of some of the miRNAs was analyzed using Log-rank (Mantel-Cox) test. RESULTS: MiR-214 showed significantly higher expression level in sporadic tissues than in hereditary ones (p = 0.0005). Triple-negative breast cancer patients with high level of miR-214 showed significantly worse disease-specific survival than patients with low level (p = 0.0314). CONCLUSIONS: Our finding suggests that miR-214 possibly could be used as a potential prognostic biomarker for triple-negative breast cancer patients. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13053-015-0028-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.