The High Expressed Serum Soluble Neural Cell Adhesion Molecule, a High Risk Factor Indicating Hepatic Encephalopathy in Hepatocelular Carcinoma Patients

Objective: To investigate whether the expression of serum soluble neural cell adhesion molecule (sNCAM)is associated with hepatic encephalopathy (HE) in hepatocelular carcinoma (HCC) patients. Materials and
Methods: The Oncomine Cancer Microarray database was used to determine the clinical relevance of NCAMexpression in different kinds of human cancers. Sera from 75 HCC cases enrolled in this study were assessed forexpression of sNCAM by enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA).
Results: Dependent on the OncomineCancer Microarray database analysis, NCAM was down regulated in 10 different kinds of cancer, like bladdercancer, brain and central nervous system cancer, while up-regulated in lung cancer, uterine corpus leiomyomaand sarcoma, compared to normal groups. Puzzlingly, NCAM expression demonstrated no significant differencebetween normal and HCC groups. However, we found by quantitative ELISA that the level of sNCAM in serafrom HCC patients with HE (347.4±151.9 ng/ml) was significantly more up-regulated than that in HCC patientswithout HE (260.3±104.2 ng/ml), the p-value being 0.008. sNCAM may be an important risk factor of HE inHCC patients, the correlation coefficients was 0.278 (P< 0.05) on rank correlation analysis.
Conclusions: Thisstudy highlights that up-regulated level of serum sNCAM is associated with HE in HCC patients and suggeststhat the high expression can be used as an indicator.