Prognostic value of carbonic anhydrase XII (CA XII) overexpression in hepatocellular carcinoma

Carbonic anhydrase XII (CA XII) is a key mediator of several signaling pathways that are involved in cancer development. This study was designed to investigate the clinical significance and prognostic value of postoperative CA XII expression in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC).

Immunohistochemistry (IHC) was performed on HCC tissue (n = 90), and the relationships between CA XII expression in the HCC tissue, the clinicopathologic features, and survival were further evaluated. The mRNA expression of CA XII and clinicopathologic characteristics of patients with hepatocellular carcinoma were extracted from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database.

CA XII was overexpressed in hepatocellular carcinoma tissues compared to normal liver tissues from the TCGA database. Moreover, CA XII mRNA expression was significantly associated with several clinicopathologic factors of hepatocellular carcinoma including sex (P = 0.011) and pathologic grade (P = 0.012). For HCC tissue samples in a tissue microarray (TMA), high CA XII protein expression was closely related to age (P = 0.013), tumor size (P = 0.014), and pathological grade (P = 0.015). A Kaplan-Meier analysis showed that elevated CA XII expression was associated with short disease-free survival (DFS) (P = 0.002) and overall survival (OS) (P = 0.006). In addition, a multivariate analysis showed that high CA XII expression was an independent prognostic indicator for disease-free survival (P = 0.018), but not overall survival, in HCC patients.

This study showed that high CA XII expression was associated with poor prognosis in HCC patients.