Post-alcoholism and post-hepatitis C cirrhosis

The aim of this study is to compare post-hepatitis C virus (HCV) and post-alcoholism cirrhosis gene expression profiling. By transcriptome analysis with a cDNA array virtually covering every transcript in liver, we compared transcript levels in alcoholic- , HCV-cirrhosis and control liver. A stringent selection identified a list of 70 transcripts which completely separated the 3 groups of patients (7 HCV-cirrhosis, 7 alcoholic cirrhosis and 8 control livers). In contrast, in an hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) context, comparison of 10 HCV-cirrhosis, 10 alcoholic cirrhosis and the 8 control livers failed to identify such transcripts. We report that dysregulations at the transcriptional level do exist in HCC-free cirrhosis, are transiently observed prior to detectable HCC. Keywords: etiology-dependent and HCC-dependent analysis Cirrhosis samples were analyzed for 14 patients without hepatocellular carcinoma (alcoholic cirrhosis : A1-A7 and HCV-cirrhosis : V8-V14) and for 20 patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (peritumoral alcoholic cirrhosis : PA1-PA10 and peritumoral HCV cirrhosis : PV11-PV20). Eight control livers (CL1-CL8) have been included. All data in the current study were obtained from 3 separate hybridizations per RNA sample (except for A7 : 2 replicates).