Abstract
Background. Gastric Cancer (GC) is a common gastrointestinal tumor, and its incidence is increasing. The pathogenesis of GC is very complex and remains unclear. Recent basic studies of GC have focused on gene expression dysregulation. Accumulating evidence has demonstrated that thioredoxin-interacting protein (TXNIP) is abnormally expressed in a variety of malignant tumors but it is obscure in GC. This study aimed to compare the expression of the TXNIP gene in cancerous and adjacent tissue of gastric cancer and evaluate its clinical significance in the prognosis and survival analysis of gastric cancer patients.
Methods. A total of 50 tumor tissues and marginal non-tumor control tissues were obtained from GC patients. Also, TXNIP gene expression levels were evaluated by real-time PCR. Meanwhile, bioinformatic approaches were used to evaluate TXNIP expression in two different cohorts of GC patients. A data mining study was also performed to determine the prognostic role of TXNIP expression in the overall survival of GC. Furthermore, a pan-cancer analysis of TXNIP expression was performed using TCGA data.
Results. The TXNIP gene was down-regulated in tumor samples with a fold change of 0.33, and the same results were repeated in bioinformatics analysis. Decreased expression of TXNIP was significantly associated with metastasis, poor differentiation, and drug abuse. Our results provided evidence that TXNIP gene expression level is positively correlated with the overall survival of GC patients. Pan-cancer analysis of TCGA data revealed down-regulated TXNIP in a variety of malignant tumors.
Conclusion. This study established low TXNIP expression as a prognostic biomarker in GC. It also revealed that the decrease in TXNIP expression likely favors metastatic GC.
Practical Implications. Evaluation of TXNIP expression is informative in the prognosis of GC patients.