The Prognostic Significance of miR-21 Expression among Surgically Resected Hepatocellular Carcinoma Patients: Evidence from a Meta-Analysis and Retrospective Cohort Study.
HCC patients who underwent surgical resection
miR-21 expression analysis
adjacent nontumor tissues
overall survival (OS) and disease-free survival (DFS)
Abstract
To date, microRNA-21 (miR-21) has been reported to be associated with the prognosis of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) in various studies, yet the results were inconsistent. The purpose of this two-part study, consisting of a retrospective cohort study and a meta-analysis, sets out to determine the prognostic role of miR-21 expression among HCC patients who underwent surgical resection The qRT-PCR analysis results of our cohort study showed miR-21 expression was significantly upregulated in HCC tissues when compared with adjacent nontumor tissues. Multivariate analysis suggested that miR-21 expression was an independent prognostic factor for overall survival (OS) (hazard ratio, HR = 2.361) and disease-free survival (DFS) (HR = 2.024) in HCC patients who underwent surgical resection. A total of 10 studies with 969 patients were enrolled in the meta-analysis, consisting of 9 studies from the database search and our cohort study. We observed that elevated miR-21 expression can predict poor OS (HR = 2.24, 95%CI = 1.73-2.91, Our study demonstrated that miR-21 high expression among surgically resected HCC patients is a prognostic factor that indicated adverse survival.