Fujian Provincial Key Laboratory of Chronic Liver Disease and Hepatocellular Carcinoma (Xiamen University Affiliated Zhongshan Hospital), Fujian, China.
Department of Pathology, Xiamen University Affiliated Zhongshan Hospital, Fujian, China.
Hum Pathol. 2019 Feb;84:213-220. doi: 10.1016/j.humpath.2018.10.006. Epub 2018 Oct 17.
DHX15 is an outstanding member of the DEAH-box RNA helicase family. A few studies suggest that DHX15 contributes to carcinogenesis in several tumor cell lines. However, whether DHX15 acts as an oncogene or tumor suppressor and its association with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) prognosis are still poorly understood. To address this question, we used immunohistochemistry to evaluate DHX15 expression patterns and their association with clinicopathological factors and the prognosis of patients with HCC. Our results showed that DHX15 expression was significantly higher in cancerous tissues than that in nontumor tissues (P < .0001). DHX15 expression in HCC patients was associated with differentiation status (P = .018), tumor number (P = .048), intrahepatic or extrahepatic metastasis (P = .001), serum α-fetoprotein (P = .006), hepatitis B virus level (P = .018), and recurrence (P < .001). In addition, the survival analysis revealed that the DHX15-high group had significantly decreased overall survival time (P = .004) and lower 1-year survival rates (P = .002) compared with the DHX15-low group. Furthermore, multivariate analysis identified DHX15 expression as an independent factor associated with poor prognosis in HCC (P = .036). In summary, these findings demonstrate, for the first time, that DHX15 is significantly upregulated in HCC and its high expression was correlated with poor prognosis, suggesting its pivotal role in the progression of HCC. The present results suggest that DHX15 may serve as a potential prognostic biomarker for HCC patients.
DHX15 是 DEAH-box RNA 解旋酶家族的杰出成员。一些研究表明，DHX15 在几种肿瘤细胞系的致癌作用中发挥作用。然而，DHX15 是否作为癌基因或肿瘤抑制因子发挥作用及其与肝细胞癌 (HCC) 预后的关系仍知之甚少。为了解决这个问题，我们使用免疫组织化学方法评估了 DHX15 的表达模式及其与 HCC 患者临床病理因素和预后的关系。我们的结果表明，DHX15 在癌组织中的表达明显高于非肿瘤组织（P<0.0001）。HCC 患者的 DHX15 表达与分化状态（P=0.018）、肿瘤数量（P=0.048）、肝内或肝外转移（P=0.001）、血清α-胎蛋白（P=0.006）、乙型肝炎病毒水平（P=0.018）和复发（P<0.001）有关。此外，生存分析显示，DHX15 高表达组的总生存时间明显缩短（P=0.004），1 年生存率明显降低（P=0.002），与 DHX15 低表达组相比。此外，多变量分析确定 DHX15 表达是与 HCC 预后不良相关的独立因素（P=0.036）。综上所述，这些发现首次表明，DHX15 在 HCC 中显著上调，其高表达与预后不良相关，提示其在 HCC 进展中起关键作用。本研究结果表明，DHX15 可能成为 HCC 患者潜在的预后生物标志物。
