Affiliations: [a] Department of Clinical Laboratory Medicine and Center for Gene Diagnosis, Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University, Wuhan 430071, Hubei, China | [b] Department of Clinical Laboratory, The First Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University, Key laboratory of Laboratory Medicine of Henan, Zhengzhou 450000, China | [c] Department of Hepatobiliary and Pancreatic Surgery, Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University, Wuhan 430071, Hubei, China
Correspondence:
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Corresponding author: Jiancheng Tu, Department of Clinical Laboratory Medicine and Center for Gene Diagnosis, Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University, Wuhan 430071, Hubei, China. Tel.: +86 027 67812989; Fax: +86 027 67813233; E-mail: jianchengtu@whu.edu.cn.
Note: [1] These authors contributed equally to this work.
Abstract: BACKGROUND: Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the most common solid tumor in global range, with high degree of malignancy and poor prognosis. But the relationship between the expression of GAS5-AS1 and HCC is not documented. This study aimed to profile GAS5-AS1 expression signature and then to explore its clinical significance in HCC. METHODS: Quantitative real-time PCR (RT-qPCR) was performed to detect the expression of GAS5-AS1 in 83 pairs of HCC surgical tissues and adjacent normal liver tissues. We also performed RT-qPCR on plasma samples of 156 patients and 58 healthy controls. RESULTS: We found that GAS5-AS1 was down-regulated in HCC tissues (P< 0.01). Correlation analysis showed that the expression of GAS5-AS1 was notably associated with differentiation (High/Moderate vs Low, P= 0.031), tumor-node-metastasis (TNM) stage (I∼II vs III∼IV, P= 0.020) and glucose levels (< 6.2 vs≧ 6.2, P= 0.047) in HCC patients. The overall survival analysis showed that patients with lower GAS5-AS1 expression had a relatively poor prognosis. Univariate and multivariate analysis elaborated that GAS5-AS1 was an independent prognostic factor for HCC patients. The area under the ROC (AUCROC) demonstrated that GAS5-AS1 presented a high accuracy (AUC = 0.824, 95% CI: 0.741–0.906) for distinguishing HCC from the cirrhosis. When differentiating HCC cases with AFP < 200 ng/ml from the cirrhosis and hepatitis B whose AFP levels were also below 200 ng/ml, GAS5-AS1 had the high sensitivity (89.5%, 89.5%, respectively). CONCLUSIONS: GAS5-AS1 could be considered as a potential prognostic and diagnostic marker in HCC. However, the potential clinical application value of GAS5-AS1 still needs to be further illustrated.
Keywords: Hepatocellular carcinoma, long non-coding RNA, GAS5-AS1, prognosis, diagnosis
