ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Cell. Infect. Microbiol.
Sec. Oral Microbes and Host
Volume 15 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fcimb.2025.1678114
This article is part of the Research TopicImpact of oral and gut microbiome on health and diseasesView all 30 articles
Integrated periodontal pathogens and Circulating miRNAs: A Novel Non-Invasive Panel of Biomarkers for Pancreatic Cancer
Provisionally accepted
Hamidreza Houri1*
Zeinab Hesami2
Valerio Pazienza3
Meysam Olfatifar4
Amir Sadeghi1
Samira Mohammadi-Yeganeh2
Nadia Trivieri3Hesameddin Eghlimi2Mojdeh Hakemi-Vala2*Elena Binda3- 1Research Institute For Gastroenterology & Liver Diseases, Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran
- 2Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran
- 3Fondazione Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza IRCCS, San Giovanni Rotondo, Italy
- 4Qom University of Medical Sciences, Qom, Iran
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The associations between oral bacterial pathogens and the risk of pancreatic cancer (PC) have been reported in several epidemiological studies. In this study, we evaluated the diagnostic potential of periodontal pathogens Porphyromonas gingivalis and Aggregatibacter actinomycetemcomitans in combination with circulating oncomiRNAs, including miR-21 and miR-155. A total of 41 PC patients and 40 age-and sex-matched controls were recruited for the study. The salivary bacterial load of P. gingivalis and A. actinomycetemcomitans, along with the copy number of miR-21 and miR-155 in blood, were measured using quantitative real-time PCR. Subsequently, logistic regression and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis were used to determine the association of biomarkers with PC risk and their diagnostic performance, respectively. Elevated load of the periodontal pathogens P. gingivalis in females (OR=2.31; 95% CI 0.98-5.47) and A. actinomycetemcomitans in diabetic individuals (OR=3.66; 95% CI 0.47-6.68) was associated with a higher risk of PC. Moreover, the diagnostic model incorporating two salivary species and two circulating miRNAs demonstrated an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.878 (95% CI 0.802-0.955). This study offers compelling new evidence supporting the idea that the combined analysis of salivary microbiota and circulating miRNAs serves as an informative avenue for the discovery of non-invasive biomarkers for PC, potentially applicable to early detection and clinical screening.
Keywords: Pancreatic Cancer, Periodontal pathogens, circulating miRNAs, non-invasive biomarkers, cancer diagnosis
Received: 01 Aug 2025; Accepted: 20 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Houri, Hesami, Pazienza, Olfatifar, Sadeghi, Mohammadi-Yeganeh, Trivieri, Eghlimi, Hakemi-Vala and Binda. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Hamidreza Houri, hr.houri@gmail.com
Mojdeh Hakemi-Vala, m.hakemi@sbmu.ac.ir
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