The obesity-related mutation gene on nonalcoholic fatty liver disease.

The prevalence of overweight and obesity is increasing, leading to metabolic-associated fatty liver disease (MAFLD) characterized by excessive accumulation of liver fat and a risk of developing hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). The driver gene mutations may play the roles of passengers that occur in single 'hotspots' and can promote tumorigenesis from benign to malignant lesions. We investigated the impact of high body weight and BMI on HCC survival using The Cancer Genome Atlas Liver Hepatocellular Carcinoma (TCGA-LIHC) dataset. To explore the effects of obesity-related gene mutations on HCC, we collected driver mutation genes in 34 TCGA patients with BMI ≥ 27 and 23 TCGA patients with BMI < 27. The digital PCR performing the PBMC samples for the variant rate by clinical cohort of 96 NAFLD patients. Our analysis showed that obesity leads to significantly worse survival outcomes in HCC. Using cbioportal, we identified 414 driver mutation genes in patients with obesity and 127 driver mutation genes in non-obese patients. Functional analysis showed that obese-related genes significantly enriched the regulated lipid and insulin pathways in HCC. The insulin secretion pathway in patients with obesity HCC-specific survival identified ABCC8 and PRKCB as significant genes (p < 0.001). It revealed significant differences in gene mutation and gene expression profiles compared to non-obese patients. The digital PCR test ABCC8 variants were detected in PBMC samples and caused a 14.5% variant rate, significantly higher than that of non-obese NAFLD patients. The study findings showed that the gene ABCC8 was a patient with the obesity-related gene in NAFLD, which provides the probability that ABCC8 mutation contributes to the pre-cancer lesion biomarker for HCC.