Low expression of GNAI3 predicts poor prognosis in patients with HCC

This study was performed with an aim to explain the underlying role of GNAI3 on the prognosis of patients with HCC.

The expression of GNAI3 at protein level was detected with the utilization of Immunohistochemistry (IHC). Chi-square test was conducted to assay the relationship between GNAI3 expression and clinical parameters of HCC patients. The correlation between expression level of GNAI3 and survival time after surgeries of HCC patients was evaluated by Kaplan-Meier method. Finally, the Cox regression was established to evaluate the relationship between GNAI3 expression and the prognosis of patients with HCC.

In this study, the negative rate of GNAI3 expression in HCC samples was about 76.6%, which was significantly higher than that in paired normal specimens (12.5%). Result showed that there was no correlation between GNAI3 expression and age, gender, liver cirrhosis and vein invasion (P>0.05), but tight relationship between GNAI3 expression and TNM stage and tumor size was found (P<0.05). The following Kaplan-Meier analysis result illustrated that negative expression of GNAI3 induced high mortality of HCC patients. Cox regression result revealed that GNAI3 might be a biomarker for prognosis of patients with HCC (HR: 0.218, P=0.016, 95% CI 0.063-0.750).

Generally, results of this study demonstrated that expression of GNAI3 shared a tight relationship with the prognosis of patients with HCC. Therefore, GNAI3 could be considered as a novel index for prognosis of patients with HCC.