High HDAC9 is associated with poor prognosis and promotes malignant progression in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma

Histone deacetylase 9 (HDAC9) is involved in a variety of malignant tumors, and leads to malignant tumor development and poor prognosis. However, the association between HDAC9 expression, and the prognosis and clinicopathological features of patients with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) remains unclear. The present study used reverse transcription-quantitative PCR, western blotting and immunohistochemistry to detect the expression level of HDAC9 in PDAC tumors and cell lines. The Kaplan-Meier method and Pearson's χ(2) test were applied to evaluate the prognostic impact of HDAC9. The present study investigated the effect of HDAC9 on the biological function of PDAC cells. The present results indicated that HDAC9 was highly expressed in PDAC tissue and PDAC cell lines (P<0.05). HDAC9 expression level in tumor tissues was negatively associated with tumor size (P=0.026), T stage (P=0.014) and N stage (P=0.004). Kaplan-Meier analysis suggested that patients with high HDAC9 had shorter recurrence-free survival (RFS; P=0.017) and disease-specific survival (DSS; P=0.022). Moreover, the present results suggested that T stage, N stage and HDAC9 expression level were independent predictive factors for RFS and DSS in patients with PDAC. In addition, silencing HDAC9 significantly inhibited the proliferation and migration of PDAC cells. The present results indicated that high expression levels of HDAC9 were associated with tumor progression and poor prognosis; thus, HDAC9 may serve as a prognostic predictor of PDAC.