Research Paper Volume 13, Issue 4 pp 5104—5119

Prognostic value of an autophagy-related long-noncoding-RNA signature for endometrial cancer

Xiufang Wang1, , Chenyang Dai1, , Minqing Ye2, , Jingyun Wang1, , Weizhao Lin1, , Ruiman Li1, ,

  • 1 Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, The First Affiliated Hospital of Jinan University, Guangzhou 510632, China
  • 2 Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Foshan Women and Children Hospital, Foshan 528000, China

Received: September 18, 2020       Accepted: November 13, 2020       Published: February 1, 2021      

https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.202431
How to Cite

Copyright: © 2021 Wang 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

This study retrieved the transcriptome profiling data of 552 endometrial cancer (EC) patients from the TCGA (The Cancer Genome Atlas) database, and identified 1297 lncRNAs (long noncoding RNAs) related to autophagy genes using Pearson correlation analysis. Univariate Cox regression analysis of the training data set revealed that 14 autophagy-related lncRNAs had significantly prognostic value for endometrial cancer (P < 0.01). Multivariate Cox regression analysis of these autophagy-related lncRNAs established the following autophagy-related lncRNA prognosis signature for endometrial cancer: PI = (0.255 × AC005229.4 expression) + (0.405 × BX322234.1 expression) + (0.169 × FIRRE expression value) + (–0.122 × RAB11B-AS1 expression) + (–0.338 × AC003102.1 expression). This signature was validated in both the testing data set and the entire data set. The areas under the receiver operating characteristics curves for the 1-, 3-, and 5-year overall survival rates in the entire data set were 0.772, 0.733, and 0.714, respectively. In addition, a gene set enrichment analysis confirmed that cancer-related and autophagy-related pathways were significantly up-regulated in the high-risk group. In summary, this study has demonstrated that a signature comprising five autophagy-related lncRNAs has potential as an independent prognostic indicator of endometrial cancer, and also that these lncRNAs may play a key role in the development of endometrial cancer.

Abbreviations

EC: endometrial cancer; TCGA: The Cancer Genome Atlas; lncRNA: long non-coding RNA; OS: overall survival; LVSI: lymph-vascular space invasion; ARG: autophagy-related gene; FDR: false discovery rate; KEGG: Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes; PI: prognostic index; ROC: receiver operating characteristic curve; AUC: area under curve; ES: enrichment score; NES: normalized enrichment score; NOM p-val: nominal p-value.