A five-DNA methylation signature act as a novel prognostic biomarker in patients with ovarian serous cystadenocarcinoma

BACKGROUND: Ovarian cancer is the most fatal tumor of the female reproductive system and the fifth leading cause of cancer death among women in the USA. The prognosis is poor due to the lack of biomarkers for treatment options. RESULTS: The methylation array data of 551 patients with ovarian serous cystadenocarcinoma (OSC) in The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database were assessed in this study to explore the methylation biomarkers associated with prognosis and improve the prognosis of patients. These patients were divided into training (first two thirds) and validation datasets (remaining one third). A five-DNA methylation signature was found to be significantly associated with the overall survival of patients with OSC using the Cox regression analysis in the training dataset. The Kaplan–Meier analysis showed that the five-DNA methylation signature could significantly distinguish the high- and low-risk patients in both training and validation sets. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis further confirmed that the five-DNA methylation signature exhibited high sensitivity and specificity to predict the prognostic survival of patients. Also, the five-DNA methylation signature was not only applicable in patients of different ages, stages, histologic grade, and size of residual tumor after surgery but also more accurate in predicting OSC prognosis compared with known biomarkers. CONCLUSIONS: This five-DNA methylation signature demonstrated the potential of being a novel independent prognostic indicator and served as an important tool for guiding the clinical treatment of OSC to improve outcome prediction and management for patients. Hence, the findings of this study might have potential clinical significance. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s13148-018-0574-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.