Abstract
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is one of the most common malignancies worldwide with poor prognosis. However, its prognostic evaluation is still an urgent problem. The objectives of this present study were to investigate oncofetal antigen glypican-3 (GPC-3) expression in HCC and their match para-cancerous tissues by the array technology with immunohistochemistry and estimate its value as a novel prognostic marker for HCC. The incidence of GPC-3 expression was 95.7 % in the cancerous tissues with significantly higher (χ2 = 33.824, P < 0.001) than that in the para-cancerous tissues (52.2 %). Abnormal expression of GPC-3 in HCC tissues was markedly related to poor or moderate differentiation (P < 0.001), hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection (P = 0.004), periportal cancer embolus (P = 0.043), and tumor-node- metastasis staging (P = 0.038). According to the univariate and multivariate analysis, the overall survival of HCC patients with high GPC-3 level was significantly worse than those with low or without GPC-3 expression (P < 0.001), suggesting that abnormal GPC-3 expression should be an independent prognostic factor for HBV-related HCC patient's survival.
Highlights
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is one of the most common and fatal malignancies worldwide with very poor prognosis [1,2,3], which is associated with a background of chronic persistent infection of hepatitis B virus (HBV) or hepatitis C virus (HCV) [4]
The strongest positive GPC-3 with brown staining particles was distributed in the cytoplasm and membrane of hepatocytes or only a few cell nuclei (Figure 1A H1 and 1A H2) in the cancerous tissues
In China, most of HCC cases are associated with HBV infection [20, 21]
Summary
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is one of the most common and fatal malignancies worldwide with very poor prognosis [1,2,3], which is associated with a background of chronic persistent infection of hepatitis B virus (HBV) or hepatitis C virus (HCV) [4]. Their infections along with alcohol and aflatoxin B1 intake are widely recognized as etiological agents in HCC [5]. Is a useful marker for HCC diagnosis, the false- negative AFP concentration alone may be as high as 40% at early stage of HCC or remain normal in 15 ~ 30% of advanced patients. The overall results for HCC prognosis have been unsatisfactory [12]
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