Investigation of the clinical significance and prognostic value of microRNA-145 in human hepatocellular carcinoma

We aimed to investigate the clinical significance and prognostic value of miR-145 in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). HCC tissue samples and adjacent normal liver tissues were obtained from 139 patients diagnosed with HCC. The relationships between the expression level of miR-145 and clinicopathologic factors were evaluated by Chi square test. Kaplan-Meier survival analysis with the log-rank test was used to evaluate the association between miR-145 expression and HCC prognosis. miR-145 was significantly down-regulated in HCC tissues compared with the adjacent noncancerous tissues (P<.001). Its expression level was significantly correlated with tumor size (P=.010), tumor number (P=.033), lymph node metastasis (P<.000), TNM stage (P<.001) and tumor differentiation (P<.001). Kaplan-Meier curves with log rank test showed that the overall survival of the patients with low miR-145 expression was significantly shorter in comparison with the high miR-145 expression patients (P=.043). Furthermore, multivariate analysis using the Cox proportional hazards model for all variables showed that miR-145 expression was an independent prognostic factor for overall survival (P=.033). Our results indicate that low expression of miR-145 is an independent poor prognostic factor for patients with HCC. Further investigations are needed to confirm our findings.