Expression of lncRNA TCONS_00027978 in hepatocellular carcinoma and its influence on prognosis and survival

Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) have been reported to have crucial roles in the regulation of various tumors. Recently, lncRNA TCONS_00027978 (TCONS_00027978) was found to be downregulated in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). This study aims at analyzing the value of TCONS_00027978 in valuing the prognosis of HCC patients.The expression of TCONS_00027978 was detected using qRT-PCR in 241 hepatocellular specimens and matched adjacent normal tissues. The association between TCONS_00027978 expression levels and clinicopathological factors was examined. Survival and Cox proportional-hazards regression analyses were performed to explore the association between TCONS_00027978 expression levels and prognosis in HCC patients.We found that the TCONS_00027978 expression level was significantly decreased in HCC tissues compared with matched normal tissues (p0.01). TCONS_00027978 was positively associated with TNM stage (p = 0.002), lymph node metastasis (p = 0.001) and histologic grade (p = 0.002) in HCC patients. In addition, Kaplan-Meier analysis indicated that low levels of TCONS_00027978 expression were associated with poorer overall survival (p = 0.002) and disease-free survival (p =0.001). Subsequently, multivariate analyses indicated that low TCONS_00027978 expression was an independent poor prognostic factor for HCC patients.Our study is the first to demonstrate the TCONS_00027978 expression as an independent prognostic factor in HCC.