concurrent evaluation of the expression and methylation of secreted frizzled-related protein 2 along with beta-catenin expression in patients with non-m3 acute myeloid leukemia

background: wnt signaling is a critical pathway for the development of acute myeloid leukemia (aml). some studies have evaluated the expression or methylation of secreted frizzledrelated protein 2 (sfrp2) as an antagonist and beta-catenin (β-catenin) as a critical mediator of this pathway. since we found no comprehensive study on these genes in iran, we aimed to investigate the status of both sfrp2 expression and methylation, and also β-catenin expression, in conjunction with clinical characteristics, in iranian patients with de novo non-m3 aml. methods: the methylation and expression of sfrp2 were determined in 188 patients with primary non-m3 aml and 60 healthy controls, who were referred to shariati hospital, tehran, iran, between january 2017 and february 2019. the methylation-specific polymerase chain reaction (pcr) and realtime quantitative pcr were used, respectively. the expression of β-catenin was explored via real-time quantitative pcr. statistical analysis was performed using the mann–whitney u test (spss software, version 23). a p value of less than 0.05 (2-tailed) was considered significant. results: sfrp2 mrna showed a significant decline in the aml group compared with the controls (p 0.001). the hypermethylation of the sfrp2 promoter occurred in 25.5% (48/188) of the cases. sfrp2 expression exhibited a negative correlation with the white blood cell count (p=0.003). the expression of β-catenin increased significantly in the patients in comparison with the controls (p 0001), and a significant difference was observed between the patients, who achieved complete remission and those, who did not (p=0.046). conclusion: the findings of this study showed that alterations in sfrp2 and β-catenin expression can be used as a potential biomarker for differentiating patients with new non-m3 aml from the controls. additionally, an evaluation of β-catenin expression may be valuable in predicting complete remission in patients with non-m3 aml.