Clinical and prognostic significance of high-mobility group box-1 in human gliomas

The objective of this study was to explore the expression and the clinical and prognostic significance of high-mobility group box-1 (HMGB1) in human gliomas. The expression of HMGB1 in 15 samples of normal brain tissue and 65 samples of different-grade glioma tissue was assayed using immunohistochemistry and western blot analysis. The associations between the differences in expression and pathology grades were analyzed statistically. Uni- and multivariate analyses were performed to investigate the prognostic value of HMGB1 expression and its expression levels. The positive rates of HMGB1 expression in normal brain and glioma tissue were 20.0% (3/15) and 76.9% (50/65), respectively. The expression of HMGB1 in glioma tissue was higher than that in normal tissue (P<0.05). The positive rates of HMGB1 expression in low-grade gliomas (LGGs, grades I and II) and high-grade gliomas (HGGs, grades III and IV) were 63.0% (17/27) and 86.8% (33/38), respectively, and the positive rates in HGG were higher than those in LGG (P=0.024). Western blot analysis showed that HMGB1 was also expressed in normal brain tissue. The expression levels in HGG were significantly higher than those in LGG (P<0.001). HMGB1-positive patients had significantly shorter overall survival times compared with HMGB1-negative patients (P=0.026). Increasing levels of HMGB1 expression significantly correlated with reduced survival times when all patients with glioma were considered (P=0.045). In conclusion, HMGB1 positivity and protein expression levels are of significant clinical and prognostic value in human gliomas. Detecting HMGB1 in human gliomas may be useful for assessing the degree of malignancy, and HMGB1 would appear to be a promising target in the clinical management of patients with glioma.