Abstract
Head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) is one of the most common cancers worldwide, accounting for almost 50% of all malignancies in developing nations. Autophagy plays a vital role in cancer initiation, malignant progression, and resistance to treatment. However, autophagy-related gene sets have rarely been analyzed in HNSCC. Hence, it is necessary to assess its clinical and pathological significance in a larger cohort of patients with HNSCC. The purpose of this study was to establish a novel autophagy-related prognostic marker for HNSCC. We screened 232 autophagy-related genes (ARGs) and identified 38 differentially expressed ARGs in The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) cohorts. The prognosis-related ARGs signature, established using the univariate and multivariate Cox proportional regression models, consists of 10 ARGs that could divide patients into high-risk and low-risk groups. Survival analysis indicated that patients in the high-risk group had dramatically shorter overall survival compared with their low-risk counterparts. Cox regression analysis further confirmed the independent prognostic value of the autophagy-related signature, and the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of the combined prognostic model was 0.722. Finally, the efficacy of autophagy-related signature was also validated by an independent cohort from the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) database. Collectively, we successfully constructed a novel autophagy-related signature for the prediction of prognosis in patients with HNSCC.
Highlights
Head and neck cancer, the sixth most common type of cancer worldwide, includes the tumors in the oral cavity, pharynx, and throat[1]
Expressed autophagy-related genes (ARGs) RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) from 502 tumor tissue samples and 44 nontumor samples were downloaded from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA)
The expression values of 232 autophagy-related genes were extracted from Head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) patients
Summary
The sixth most common type of cancer worldwide, includes the tumors in the oral cavity, pharynx, and throat[1]. Each year in the world, more than half a million patients are diagnosed as head and neck cancer, among which 325,000 individuals die of it[2]. Head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) accounts for nearly 95% of head and neck malignancies, and its major causative agents are human papillomavirus (HPV) infection, cigarette smoking, and alcohol consumption. Patients with these risk factors are more likely to have. The autophagosome, a Official journal of the Cell Death Differentiation Association
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