肺腺癌自噬相关基因预后风险评分模型构建及验证

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Autophagy related genes (ARGs) regulate lysosomal degradation to induce autophagy, and are involved in the occurrence and development of a variety of cancers. The expression of ARGs in tumor tissues has a great prospect in predicting the survival of patients. The aim of this study was to construct a prognostic risk score model for lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) based on ARGs. METHODS: 5, 786 ARGs were obtained from GeneCards database. Gene expression profiles and clinical data of 395 LUAD patients were collected from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database. All ARGs expression data were extracted, and The ARGs differentially expressed were identified by R software. Survival analysis of differentially expressed ARGs was performed to screen for ARGs with prognostic value, and functional enrichment analysis was performed. The least absolute selection operator (LASSO) regression and Cox regression model were used to construct a prognostic risk scoring model for ARGs. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was drawn to obtain the optimal cut-off value of risk score. According to the cut-off value, the patients were divided into high-risk group and low-risk group. The area under curve (AUC) and the Kaplan-Meier survival curve was plotted to evaluate the model performance, which was verified in external data sets. Finally, univariate and multivariate Cox regression analysis was applied to evaluate the independent prognostic value of the model, and its clinical relevance was analyzed. RESULTS: Survival analysis, Lasso regression and Cox regression analysis were used to construct a LUAD prognostic risk score model with five ARGs (ADAM12, CAMP, DKK1, STRIP2 and TFAP2A). The survival time of patients with low-risk score in this model was significantly better than that of patients with high-risk score (P < 0.001). The model showed good prediction performance for LUAD in both the training set (AUCmax=0.78) and two external validation sets (AUCmax=0.88). Risk score was significantly associated with the prognosis of LUAD patients in univariate and multivariate Cox regression analyses, suggested that risk score could be a potential independent prognostic factor for LUAD. Correlation analysis of clinical characteristic showed that high risk score was closely associated with high T stage, high tumor stage and poor prognosis. CONCLUSION: We constructed a LUAD risk score model consisting of five ARGs, which can provide a reference for predicting the prognosis of LUAD patients, and may be used in combination with tumor node metastasis (TNM) staging for prognosis prediction of LUAD patients in the future.