Blood DNA methylation markers in potentially identified Chinese patients with hepatocellular carcinoma

To determine whether blood DNA methylation is associated with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) for Chinese patients, we used genome-wide DNA methylation detection to access the blood samples of Chinese patients by Illumina Human methylation 450K arrays. Sixty potentially gene locis which had different methylated levels significantly among tumor and adjacent normal tissues would be tested in this study. A previous study was conducted in China communities and followed with 7 years. The DNA from white blood cells (WBC) from 192 patients with HCC and 215 matched controls were assayed in this study. The chi 2 test was used to measure data to categorize variables and t-test was uesd to evaluate the different characteristics among groups. Besides, odds ratios (OR) and 95%CI was calculated for matching factors by conditional logistic regression models. We found that high methylation in WNK2 was related to increased risk of HCC, and high methylation in TPO were related to decreased risk of HCC. In our multivariable conditional logistic regression models, these results all exist. Those findings support the methylated changes of WNK2 and TPO may become a new detection index for HCC patients in clinical laboratory. However, the results should be replicated in additional prospective studies with lager samples.