Expression of MICAL-L2 in grade Ⅱ/Ⅲ glioma and its prognostic assessment value

WANG Min; ZHOU Li; TIAN Jia; WEN Lijun; ZHENG Shiyao; LIU Kun

doi:10.3969/j.issn.1674-4136.2025.06.012

Abstract：Objective To investigate the expression of MICAL-L2 in WHO grade Ⅱ/Ⅲ glioma and its prognostic assessment value.Methods A total of 96 cases of surgically resected adult primary WHO gradeⅡ/Ⅲ glioma specimens from 2013 to 2019 at the Second People's Hospital of Liaocheng were collected,with 10 normal brain tissue specimens serving as controls.Immunohistochemistry(IHC)was employed to validate MICAL-L2 protein expression in WHO grade Ⅱ/Ⅲ glioma versus normal brain tissues.Associations between MICAL-L2 expression and clinicopathological parameters were analyzed.Prognostic differences in Kaplan-Meier curves were assessed using the Log-rank test.Univariate and multivariate Cox regression analyses were performed to identify potential risk factors.The prognostic value of MICAL-L2 in grade Ⅱ/Ⅲ glioma patients was evaluated by receiver operating characteristic(ROC)Area under the curve(AUG).Results MICAL-L2 protein expression was significantly elevated in 96 adult WHO grade Ⅱ/Ⅲ glioma tissues versus normal brain tissues(P＜0.05).Elevated MICAL-L2 expression correlated significantly with the age of patients,the level of tumor pathology,and the high expression of Ki-67(P＜0.01).The Kaplan-Meier survival curve indicated that the overall survival of patients with high expression of MICAL-L2 was lower than that of patients with low expression(P＜0.001).Multivariate Cox regression model analysis revealed that age greater than 46.5 years,WHO grade Ⅲ glioma and high MICAL-L2 expression were independent risk factors for patient prognosis(P＜0.05).The ROC curve demonstrated that MICAL-L2 achieved an area under the curve(AUC)of 0.837 in predicting the 5-year overall survival of WHO grade Ⅱ/Ⅲ glioma patients,indicating good prognostic predictive capability.Conclusions MICAL-L2 demonstrates elevated expression in WHO grade Ⅱ/Ⅲ glioma and exhibits a significant association with patient prognosis.It may serve as a novel biomarker for risk stratification in WHO grade Ⅱ/Ⅲ glioma and lays the theoretical foundation for developing new molecular therapeutic targets.