Analysis of the effect of platelet-derived growth factor combined with T cells in the diagnosis of hepatocellular carcinoma and poor prognosis
Abstract
Objective: The aim of this study is to investigate the diagnostic and prognostic value of combined detection of serum platelet-derived growth factor (PDGF) and Treg/Th17 in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC).
Methods: We included 204 HCC patients managed with drug eluting beads-transcatheter arterial chemoembolization (D-TACE) and 100 healthy controls. Serum PDGF concentrations were measured via enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), while flow cytometry quantified Treg and Th17 cell proportions. The predictive performance of PDGF, Th17/Treg, and their combination for HCC diagnosis, therapeutic response, and 1-year overall survival (OS) was evaluated using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis, Kaplan-Meier survival curves, and multivariate regression models.
Results: HCC cases exhibited notable elevations in serum PDGF concentrations and Th17/Treg than healthy controls, with tumor tissue PDGF expression significantly correlating with serum levels (P<0.05). In addition, we found a positive correlation between PDGF, Th17/Treg and tumor markers in HCC patients (P<0.05). PDGF + Th17/Treg detection yielded an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.835 (68.14% sensitivity, 82.00% specificity), surpassing individual markers. For predicting D-TACE non-response (progressive disease, PD), the combined detection showed 71.70% sensitivity and 84.11% specificity. The 1-year OS rates of the high PDGF group and the high Th17/Treg group were 75.19% (97/129) and 61.22% (30/49), respectively, while the 1-year OS rates of the low PDGF group and the low Th17/Treg group were 92.00% (69/75) and 87.74% (136/155), respectively (P<0.05). The AUC of the combined model for predicting death was 0.705.
Conclusion: PDGF combined with Th17/Treg showed excellent diagnostic value for the occurrence and poor prognosis of HCC.
Copyright (c) 2025 Fei Wu, Guo Chen, Zuxin Wang, Youquan Niu, Wenqing Zhang, Hua Jiang
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
The published articles will be distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY). It is allowed to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and remix, transform, and build upon it for any purpose, even commercially, as long as appropriate credit is given to the original author(s), a link to the license is provided and it is indicated if changes were made. Users are required to provide full bibliographic description of the original publication (authors, article title, journal title, volume, issue, pages), as well as its DOI code. In electronic publishing, users are also required to link the content with both the original article published in Journal of Medical Biochemistry and the licence used.
Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.