Expression of lncRNA HULC in cervical cancer and its correlation with tumor progression and patient survival

OBJECTIVE: To investigate Long non-coding RNA HULC (HULC) expression in cervical cancer and to evaluate its clinical significance. PATIENTS AND METHODS: HULC expression in 244 pairs of human cervical cancer and adjacent normal tissues was detected by real-time quantitative RT-PCR assay. The correlation between HULC and clinicopathological factors was also evaluated. The clinical and prognostic significance of HULC expression was analyzed statistically by Kaplan-Meier estimate and Cox regression model. RESULTS: HULC expression was high in cervical cancer (p < 0.01). Also, the high HULC expression was significantly associated with the FIGO stage, lymph node metastasis and depth of cervical invasion (p < 0.05). Kaplan-Meier analysis showed that cervical cancer patients with high expression of HULC possessed poorer outcome than those with low expression of HULC (p < 0.001). Based on the univariate and multivariate analysis, the elevated expression of the HULC protein was a significant predictor of poor prognosis for cervical cancer patients (p = 0.001). CONCLUSIONS: Our data firstly showed that the expression of HULC was upregulated in cervical cancer, and associated with overall survival, indicating that HULC may serve as a predictive biomarker for the prognosis of cervical cancer.