Fig. 5

Whole blood miRNA levels comparison between CTC⁺ and CTC⁻ patients. Cytokeratin positive circulating tumor cells (CTCs) (in red) stained with the APAAP immunodetection system (a). Dot plots show relative levels of oncogenic miR-19a, − 21 and − 22 and of tumor suppressors miR-20a, − 127 and -200b in the different patients’ subgroups analyzed at T0 (before adjuvant therapy). Only miR-127 showed a significant difference between CTC⁺ and CTC⁻ patients. The differences were calculated using the Mann-Whitney U test (AUC = 0.70; p = 0.043) (^*p ≤ 0.05) (b)