Increased expression of long noncoding RNA AK021443 predicts worse clinical outcome in hepatocellular carcinoma.

OBJECTIVE

Dysregulation of long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) plays critical roles in the process of carcinogenesis and tumor progression. LncRNA AK021443 (AK021443) has been reported to serve as a tumor promoter in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). The purpose of this study was to investigate the expression of AK021443 and its prognostic value in HCC..

PATIENTS AND METHODS

Quantitative Real-Time-PCR was used to examine the expression of AK021443 in 193 HCC tissues and adjacent non-tumor tissues. The correction between AK021443 expression and clinicopathological characteristics was evaluated with Chi-square test. To determine its prognostic value, overall survival was evaluated using the Kaplan-Meier method. Univariate and multivariate analyses were performed to analyze the prognostic significance of AK02144 expression.

RESULTS

The results revealed that AK021443 expression levels were significantly higher in HCC tissues than in the corresponding noncancerous tissues (p<0.01). Besides, high AK021443 expression was correlated with poor tumor differentiation (p = 0.002), advanced clinical stage (p=0.001) and positive lymph node metastasis (p=0.005). In addition, the Kaplan-Meier survival curves revealed that HCC patients with high AK021443 expression level had shorter overall survival than those with low AK021443 expression level (p=0.0005). Finally, the multivariable analysis suggested that increased AK021443 expression was an independent prognostic factor of overall survival in HCC patients.

CONCLUSIONS

Our findings indicated that AK021443 may play an important role in tumorigenesis and progression and would be a powerful marker to predict the prognosis of HCC patients.