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.