Investigation of mir-146 and mir-149 gen variantin in oral cancer

Cancer, in Turkey as well as all over the world is one of the most important public health problem. Oral cancer is the sixth most common cancer in the world. The risk of oral cancer in men who are over 50 years of age is higher than others. Oral cancer is one of the most common cancer types and its risk factors; smoking, excessive alcohol consumption are known reasons to increase tumor growth. The main options in the treatment of oral cancer are surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are generally a class of endogenous RNA molecules that are non-coding 20-23 nucleotides in length. They have roles in many physiological and pathological processes including cell characterization and differentiation. In addition, some miRNAs are defined as oncogenes, while others are tumor suppressors in cancer. With the help of increasing knowledge of miRNA's functions and their roles in cancer, they have become a new hope to understand the molecular pathology of cancer and to develop a method of molecular targeting therapy. In this study, to determine the effect of polymorphism of miR146 and miR 149 genes' on oral cancer, 42 oral cancer patients with a mean age of 63.05 ± 13.250 and 100 healthy people with a mean age of 60.37 ± 8,666, total of 142 individuals were obtained, including polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP). The relationship between cancer risk and clinicopathological features were analyzed by χ2 test. In this study, our results showed that miR-146 polymorphism was significantly associated with oral cancer (p = 0.000). In this study, our results also showed that miR-149 polymorphism was not significantly associated with oral cancer (p = 0.425). Keywords: Oral Cancer, miR-146 polymorphism, miR-149 gene polymorphism, chemotherapy, radiotherapy