YRNA1 expression as a candidate prognostic biomarker in oral tongue squamous cell carcinoma: an exploratory cohort study

Objective: Oral tongue squamous cell carcinoma (OTSCC) is an aggressive cancer with a 5-year survival of about 60%, highlighting the need for improved molecular risk stratification. Y RNAs (YRNAs) are small non-coding RNAs implicated in tumor progression, but their prognostic role in OTSCC is unclear. This exploratory retrospective cohort study assessed the prognostic value of YRNA1 expression in 26 patients with primary OTSCC who underwent surgical treatment between 2021 and 2022. Design: YRNA1 expression in tumor tissue was quantified using quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR), and associations with clinicopathological features and 3-year disease-specific survival were analyzed using nonparametric tests, Kaplan–Meier analysis, and Cox regression. Results: YRNA1 expression was significantly higher in patients who died within 3 years of surgery than in those surviving beyond 3 years ( p  = 0.020) and showed a moderate positive correlation with T stage and death during follow-up. Kaplan-Meier analysis demonstrated significantly poorer survival in patients with high YRNA1 expression compared with those with low expression (log-rank p  = 0.020). In an exploratory multivariable Cox model, restricted to T stage and YRNA1 expression to avoid overfitting given the limited number of events (11 deaths), YRNA1 expression showed prognostic potential. Each one-unit increase in log₂-transformed YRNA1 expression was associated with a 43% increase in the hazard of OTSCC-related death (HR = 1.43, 95% CI: 1.12–2.03; p  = 0.049). However, these findings are exploratory and require validation in larger cohorts. Conclusions: Elevated YRNA1 expression is associated with poorer disease-specific survival in this cohort of patients with OTSCC, suggesting potential prognostic relevance that requires validation in larger, independent cohorts.