Prognostic significance of regulatory T lymphocytes in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma

Abstract

Abstract:We investigated the prognostic role of regulatory T cells (Tregs) in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Relevant evidence regarding prognostic significance of Tregs was systematically searched in MEDLINE and Embase databases. A meta-analysis was performed to compare survival in patients with high or low Tregs level (either in peripheral blood or tumor). Eighteen studies were identified that fulfilled for the eligibility criteria and were included for data synthesis. Our pooled hazard ratios (HRs) demonstrated that increased Tregs intratumoral accumulation was significantly associated with worse overall survival (HR=2.04, 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.72-2.42) and diseasefree survival (HR=1.82, 95% CI: 1.58-2.09). Three studies evaluated the role of Tregs in peripheral blood, and all of them showed that increased peripheral Tregs correlated with shortened disease-free and overall survival. Collectively, our results showed that the increased Tregs count is tightly associated with the shortened survivals. Its measurement in either primary tumor or even circulation might be a candidate marker of prognostic significance in HCC patients.

Learning the Roles of the Hepatic Adaptive Immune System in Hepatocellular Carcinoma—Nature's Guide for Successful Cancer Immunotherapy

“…Two meta-analyses inspecting such studies concluded that the absolute numbers of intratumoral Treg cells, as well as numbers of peripheral Treg cells, may well be correlated with a bad prognosis. 35,36 Taken together this lends strong support to the notion that the adaptive immune system, which is negatively regulated by Treg cells, plays key roles in keeping HCC in check. It is now imperative to identify the mechanisms through which Treg cells are recruited to HCCs, as targeting these mechanisms could offer significant therapeutic opportunities.…”

Association between density of tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes and prognoses of patients with gastric cancer

“…[ 4 , 5 ] The density of TILs is considered a manifestation of the host immune response against tumor cells. Nowadays, the association between TILs and patients’ clinical outcomes have been investigated in non-small cell lung cancer, [ 6 ] esophageal squamous cell carcinoma, [ 7 ] hepatocellular carcinoma, [ 8 ] and breast cancers, [ 9 ] and so on. Moreover, lots of studies have investigated the prognostic impact of TILs on patients with gastric cancer, but their results were inconsistent.…”

Loss of alanine-glyoxylate and serine-pyruvate aminotransferase expression accelerated the progression of hepatocellular carcinoma and predicted poor prognosis

“…To date, a large proportion of existed systematic reviews or meta studies on HCC markers were about serum markers [67, 68], and others were focused on one or a set of genes [69, 70], inflammatory-based markers [71, 72]. Due to the differences across experimental methods, sample size and quality, inconsistent annotation and the methods used for data processing and analysis, it is difficult to do integrated bioinformatics analysis with microarray data from different platforms, and sometimes even the raw data are not available in public databases, so there are very few studies that combined the data form different HCC gene expression profiles [73, 74].…”