J Cancer 2018; 9(12):2203-2210. doi:10.7150/jca.24024 This issue Cite
Research Paper
1. Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, West China School of Basic Medical Sciences & Forensic Medicine, Sichuan University, Chengdu 610041, China
2. Division of Liver Transplantation, Department of Liver Surgery, West China Hospital, Sichuan University, Chengdu, Sichuan Province,China
3. Department of Forensic Genetics, West China School of Basic Science and Forensic Medicine, Sichuan University, Chengdu 610041, China
4. West China School of Public Health, Sichuan University, Chengdu 610041, China
5. Analytical & testing center, Sichuan University, Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China
#These authors contributed equally to this work
Background: Most hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) patients have undergone a progression from chronic hepatitis, then liver cirrhosis (LC), and finally to carcinoma. The objective of this study was to elucidate risk factors to predict HCC development for cirrhosis patients.
Methods: Multiple methylated specific PCR (MSP) was applied to determine methylation status of heparocarcinogenesis-related genes in 396 tissue and plasma specimens and multivariate cox model was used to analyze the relationship between risk variables and HCC development among cirrhosis patients, followed up in a median period of 30 months.
Results: Among 105 LC cases, HCC incidence rate at 30 months was 30.48% (32/105), which were statistically associated with patients' age and aberrant methylation of p16, SFRP, and LINE1 (p<0.05). Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve showed the overall predictive accuracy reached the highest (90.7%) if the four risk variables were concurrent to predict HCC development. Moreover, along with the growth of age from 0-40, 40-55, to 55-70 years or the increased number of aberrantly-methylated gene from 0-1 to 2-3, the HCC incidence rate of cirrhosis patients rised from 10.00%, 12.28% to 82.14% and 17.44% to 89.47%, separately. Thus, based on combined analysis with diverse age and number of aberrantly-methylated gene, 105 cases were divided into five groups and computed their respective HCC incidecne rate to categorize them into different risk groups. Of note, A significant lifting of HCC incidence rate in the high-risk group (40-55 years coupled with 2-3 aberrantly-methylated genes, 55-70 years coupled with 0-1 aberrantly-methylated gene, 55-70 years coupled with 2-3 aberrantly-methylated genes; n=33) was observed compared with the low-risk group (0-40 years coupled with 0-1 aberrantly-methylated gene, 40-55 years coupled with 0-1 aberrantly-methylated gene; (n=72) (p<0.01).
Conclusions: Ultimately, high-risk cirrhosis patients with 55-over years or 2-3 aberrantly-methylated genes should be paid more attention to be regularly screened with HCC development.
Keywords: Liver cirrhosis, Methylation, Hepatocellular carcinoma, Prediction, HCC incidence, Biomarkers.