A novel ferroptosis-related genes model for prognosis prediction of lung adenocarcinoma

BACKGROUND: Ferroptosis is a newly discovered form of cell death characterized by iron-dependent lipid peroxidation. This study aims to investigate the potential correlation between ferroptosis and the prognosis of lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD). METHODS: RNA-seq data were collected from the LUAD dataset of The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database. Based on ferroptosis-related genes, differentially expressed genes (DEGs) between LUAD and paracancerous specimens were identified. The univariate Cox regression analysis was performed to screen key genes associated with the prognosis of LUAD. LUAD patients were divided into the training set and validation set. Then, we screened out key genes and built a prognostic prediction model involving 5 genes using the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) regression with tenfold cross-validation and the multivariate Cox regression analysis. After dividing LUAD patients based on the median level of risk score as cut-off value, the generated prognostic prediction model was validated in the validation set. Moreover, we analyzed the somatic mutations, and estimated the scores of immune infiltration in the high-risk and low-risk groups. Functional enrichment analysis of DEGs was performed as well. RESULTS: High-risk scores indicated the worse prognosis of LUAD. The maximum area under curve (AUC) of the training set and the validation set in this study was 0.7 and 0.69, respectively. Moreover, we integrated the age, gender, and tumor stage to construct the composite nomogram. The charts indicated that the AUC of LUAD cases with the survival time of 1, 3 and 5 years was 0.698, 0.71 and 0.73, respectively. In addition, the mutation frequency of LUAD patients in the high-risk group was significantly higher than that in the low-risk group. Simultaneously, DEGs were mainly enriched in ferroptosis-related pathways by analyzing the functional results. CONCLUSIONS: This study constructs a novel LUAD prognosis prediction model involving 5 ferroptosis-related genes, which can be used as a promising tool for decision-making of clinical therapeutic strategies of LUAD. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12890-021-01588-2.