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Research Paper|Volume 12, Issue 24|pp 25778—25804

Identification of prognostic aging-related genes associated with immunosuppression and inflammation in head and neck squamous cell carcinoma

Jing Yang1,2, Qingshan Jiang3, Lijun Liu3, Hong Peng3, Yaya Wang3, Shuyan Li3, Yanhua Tang3, Jing Yu3, Runliang Gan2, Zhifeng Liu3
  • 1Department of Gastroenterology, The First Affiliated Hospital of University of South China, Hengyang 421001, Hunan Province, P.R. China
  • 2Cancer Research Institute, Hunan Province Key Laboratory of Tumor Cellular and Molecular Pathology, University of South China, Hengyang 421001, Hunan Province, P.R. China
  • 3Department of Otorhinolaryngology, The First Affiliated Hospital of University of South China, Hengyang 421001, Hunan Province, P.R. China
Received: July 21, 2020Accepted: September 29, 2020Published: November 24, 2020
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.104199

Copyright: © 2020 Yang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Aging is regarded as a dominant risk factor for cancer. Additionally, inflammation and asthenic immune surveillance with aging may facilitate tumor formation and development. However, few studies have comprehensively analyzed the relationship between aging-related genes (AGs) and the prognosis, inflammation and tumor immunity of head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC). Here, we initially screened 41 differentially expressed AGs from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database. In the training set, a prognosis risk model with seven AGs (APP, CDKN2A, EGFR, HSPD1, IL2RG, PLAU and VEGFA) was constructed and validated in the TCGA test set and the GEO set (P < 0.05). Using univariate and multivariate Cox regression analyses, we confirmed that risk score was an independent prognostic factor of HNSCC patients. In addition, a high risk score was significantly correlated with immunosuppression, and high expression of PLAU, APP and EGFR was the main factor. Furthermore, we confirmed that a high risk score was significantly associated with levels of proinflammatory factors (IL-1α, IL-1β, IL-6 and IL-8) in HNSCC samples. Thus, this risk model may serve as a prognostic signature and provide clues for individualized immunotherapy for HNSCC patients.