Abstract
The purpose of this study was to investigate the expression and clinical significance of N6-methyladenosine demethylase FTO in thyroid cancer. Bioinformatic analysis showed that FTO expression was downregulated in thyroid cancer tissues and correlated with lymph node metastasis in thyroid cancer patients. We conducted experimental verification by collecting Asian samples. The results of quantitative reverse transcription-PCR showed that the mRNA expression of FTO in the blood of 30 thyroid cancer patients was lower than that of the control population. At the same time, we found that FTO expression was negative in tissues of 16/56 (28.57%) thyroid cancer cases and 4/40 (10.00%) nontumor thyroid cases through the immunohistochemical method, indicating a lower FTO expression in thyroid cancer tissues than nontumor thyroid tissues (p < 0.05). In addition, the protein expression of FTO was significantly related to the tumor grade and lymph node metastasis in thyroid cancer patients (p < 0.05), but not to other clinicopathological features. Multivariate logistic regression analysis showed that FTO expression was an independent risk factor for tumor grade. Survival analysis showed no significant difference in the disease-free survival time of thyroid cancer patients between high expression and low expression groups of FTO. Furthermore, bioinformatic analysis found that promoter DNA methylation and copy number variation might cause downregulated FTO and then affect TP53 pathways in thyroid cancer. We found that FTO expression was downregulated in thyroid cancer tissues and related to the progression of thyroid cancer, suggesting a tumor suppressor role of FTO in thyroid cancer.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
