Long non-coding RNA Loc554202 expression as a prognostic factor in patients with colorectal cancer

To investigate the expression and clinical significance of long non-coding RNA Loc554202 (lncRNA Loc554202) in human colorectal cancer (CRC).

The expression of Loc554202 was detected in 178 CRC tissues and matched normal colorectal tissue samples by qRT-PCR. The potential relationship between Loc554202 levels and clinicopathological features of CRC Kaplan-Meier curves and multivariate Cox proportional models were used to study the impact on clinical outcome.

Our findings showed that Loc554202 appeared to have lower expression in the CRC tissues, compared with the adjacent non-cancerous colorectal tissues. Down-regulated expression of Loc554202 was significantly associated with TNM stage, histologic grade, and lymph node metastasis (p < 0.05), but not other clinical parameters. Kaplan-Meier analysis clearly illustrated that the patients with the lower expression of Loc554202 had a worse outcome compared to patients with higher Loc554202 expression (p < 0.001). Furthermore, in a multivariate Cox model, we found that Loc554202 expression was an independent poor prognostic factor for both 5-year OS (p = 0.007) and 5-year DFS (p = 0.004) in CRC.

Our data indicated that Loc554202 may serve as a promising biomarker for predicting the prognosis of CRC.