• Zhiping Xiang, Geofrey Mahiki Mranda, Xingguo Zhou, Ying Xue, Yu Wang, Tian Wei, Junjian Liu, and Yinlu Ding.
• Department of Gastrointestinal Surgery, The Second Hospital, Cheeloo College of Medicine, Shandong University, Jinan, Shandong, China.
• Medicine (Baltimore). 2022 Sep 9; 101 (36): e30219e30219.

BackgroundHepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the sixth most common cancer, which is characterized by complicated etiology, excessive heterogeneity, and poor prognosis. Necroptosis is a new kind of programmed cell death, which is intently associated with the occurrence and development of tumors. Although researchers have had a deep understanding of necroptosis in recent years, the expression level of necroptosis-related genes in HCC and its relationship with the survival time of HCC patients are not clear.MethodsAccording to the expression of necroptosis-related genes and the survival of HCC patients, HCC patients in the TCGA database were divided into 2 groups that were relatively independent of each other. The genes related to the survival time of HCC patients were screened from the 2 groups of differentially expressed genes. By using the Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator Cox regression analysis, the optimal λ value was obtained, and the 10-gene signature model was established.ResultsAccording to the median risk score of the TCGA cohort, HCC patients were averagely divided into high- and low-risk groups. Compared with the low-risk group, the death toll of the high-risk group was relatively higher and the survival time was relatively shorter. Principal component analysis and t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding analysis showed that there was a significant separation between high- and low-risk groups. Through Kaplan-Meier analysis, it was found that the survival time of HCC patients in the high-risk group was significantly shorter than that in the low-risk group. Through receiver operating characteristic analysis, it was found that the sensitivity and specificity of the model were good. We also make a comprehensive analysis of the international cancer genome consortium database as a verification queue and prove the reliability of the 10-gene signature model. Gene Ontolog, Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes, and single-sample gene set enrichment analysis showed that many biological processes and pathways related to immunity had been enriched, and the antitumor immune function was weakened in the high-risk population.ConclusionThe risk score can be considered as an independent prognostic factor to predict the prognosis of patients with HCC, and necroptosis-related genes are also closely related to tumor immune function.Copyright © 2022 the Author(s). Published by Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc.

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