Figure 4

Expression level of PLOD2 in BC clinical specimens. (A) The expression level of PLOD2 was significantly upregulated in BC tissues in comparison with that in normal bladder tissues. GUSB was used for normalisation (P=0.0001). (B) Spearman’s rank test showed the trend towards significance about inverse correlations between the expression levels of miR-26a-5p/miR-26b-5p and PLOD2 (P=0.1248, R=−0.159 and P=0.1345, R=−0.155, respectively). (C) To determine whether the levels of PLOD2 mRNA in tumour tissues were correlated with clinicopathological parameters, we analysed the expression level of the PLOD2 gene in human tumour samples. PLOD2 expression was significantly increased in samples from patients with T3 stage disease as compared with that in samples from patients with T2 stage disease or lower (P=0.0119). Additionally, PLOD2 expression was significantly increased in pN1 or pN2 samples compared with that in pN0 samples (P=0.0490). (D) Kaplan–Meier survival plots for high and low expression groups for PLOD2, as determined for 69 patients. Overall survival was significantly prolonged in patients with low PLOD2 expression compared with that in patients with high expression (P=0.0153). The median follow-up of the patients was 45.8 months.