AIM:To analyze circulating miR-141 in the serum as a non-invasive biomarker in the patients with prostate cancer ( PCa) and benign prostate hyperplasia ( BPH) , and healthy individuals.METHODS: A total of 75 pa-tients with PCa, 52 with BPH and 40 healthy individuals were enrolled into this study.Total RNA was isolated from the se-rum samples and the circulating levels of miR-141 were determined using quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction. RESULTS:The serum levels of miR-141 were significantly higher in the patients with PCa compared to the patients with BPH and the healthy controls (P<0.01).The level of miR-141 in PCa group obviously differed from that in BPH group and healthy control group with high diagnosis performance, with areas under the curve of 0.785 and 0.801, respectively. No statistically significant difference of the serum miR-141 levels between the patients with BPH and healthy individuals was observed (P>0.05).The serum miR-141 level was also found to be related to Gleason score, clinical stage and bone me-tastasis status of the patients with PCa (P<0.05), and the patients with higher Gleason scores had higher serum miR-141 levels.No relationship was detected between miRNA-141 level and the patient’ s age, biochemistry recurrence and serum prostate-specific antigen level (P>0.05 for all comparisons).CONCLUSION: Circulating miR-141 could serve as a non-invasive biomarker for prostate cancer diagnosis, staging and prognosis prediction.

Objective To explore the changes of whole brain white matter ( WM) structural net-work topological property in patients with schizophrenia (SP) and the associations between WM networks to-pological efficiency and clinical variables in patients. Methods Deterministic tractography was used to con-struct the WM networks of 59 patients with SP ( patients group) and 41 age-, handedness-, and gender-matched healthy controls (HCs),and graph theoretical methods were applied to investigate abnormalities in the global and nodal properties of the WM network in these patients. Partial correlation analysis was used to analyze the relationship between global and nodal properties of the WM network and clinical variables in pa-tients with SP. Results Both the patients with SP and HCs showed small-world organization of the WM net-works. However,compared with HCs,the patients with SP exhibited significant abnormal global topology,in-cluding increased shortest path length ( t=7. 95, P=0. 0001) and decreased global efficiency ( 30. 83 ± 16. 08,8. 25±6. 13,t=-9. 81,P=0. 002),clustering coefficiency (0. 03±0. 01,0. 02±0. 01,t=-4. 48,P=0. 0003),the average clustering coefficiency (t=-8. 28,P=0. 002),the small-worldness (3. 92±0. 79,2. 79 ±0. 56,t=-7. 82,P=0. 001) of their WM structural networks(all P<0. 005,FDR corrected). Further,the patients with SP showed a reduction in nodal efficiency predominately in the cingulate gyrus ( t=-4. 11, P=0. 000),superior occipital gyrus ( t=-6. 05, P=0. 002), superior temporal gyrus ( t=-10. 46, P=0. 001),middle temporal gyrus (t=-10. 38,P=0. 000),thalamus (t=-6. 10,P=0. 000) and putamen ( t=-8. 38,P=0. 000) (P<0. 005,FDR corrected). Partial correlation results showed that there was no signifi-cant correlation between global topological properties,node efficiency and clinical symptoms in patients group (Eglob:r=-0. 14,P=0. 279;Eloc:r=-0. 06,P=0. 628;Lp:r=0. 28,P=0. 031;Cp:r=0. 27,P=0. 043;λ:r=-0. 18,P=0. 166;γ:r=-0. 29,P=0. 026;σ:r=0. 26,P=0. 048;nEglob:r=0. 36,P=0. 005;nEloc:r=0. 02,P=0. 901). Conclusions The patients with SP exhibit the abnormal of whole brain WM structural network topological property and the node efficiencies of cortico-striato-thalamo circuitry are significantly re-duced.