Prognostic value of glucose transporter 3 expression in hepatocellular carcinoma

Determining an effective biomarker for predicting the prognosis of patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) may improve patient survival rates. The present study aimed to investigate the expression of glucose transporter 3 (GLUT-3) in HCC and to determine its predictive value for the survival of patients with HCC. Immunohistochemistry was used to detect GLUT-3 expression in HCC tissues of 275 and 140 patients with HCC from training and validation cohorts, respectively. The association between GLUT-3 expression and the clinicopathological characteristics of patients with HCC, and between GLUT-3 expression and patient survival rates were analyzed. The predictive value of GLUT-3 expression was confirmed using the validation cohort. The results demonstrated that the high GLUT-3 expression in HCC tissues was significantly associated with elevated alpha-fetoprotein level, large tumor size, poor histological differentiation and Tumor-Node-Metastasis stages III and IV (P<0.05). In addition, GLUT-3 high expression was also significantly associated with reduced overall survival of patients with HCC in the training and validation cohorts. In conclusion, the results from the present study suggested that GLUT-3 may be considered as a potential independent prognostic factor for predicting the survival of patients with HCC.