Comment on “Thrombopoietin is associated with the prognosis of gastric adenocarcinoma”

Dear Editor,

We were pleased to read the study by Zhou et al.¹, and colleagues in which they found that thrombopoietin(THPO) may be a potent marker of gastric adenocarcinoma, providing a novel potential screening method for gastric adenocarcinoma. I would like to make some of my points.

To begin with, they concluded that THPO may be a potent regulator in gastric adenocarcinoma progression. However, the interpretation of the TCGA database and the pathophysiological relevance of the postulated pieces of evidence would need extensive reworking. m not convinced that the interpretation of the TAGA database is correct. In the TCGA database, the fold change of THPO expression between gastric cancer and normal gastric mucosa was not significant (1.28). In addition, THPO expression was decreased in gastric cancer tissues than in normal gastric mucosa in the GEO database. Thus, this manuscript would need extensive reanalysis of the TCGA and GEO databases.

Additionally, the study found that THPO would be deeply involved in gastric cancer progression. However, it was not reasonable to prove their hypothesis. They used the TCGA database for analysis of THPO expression in gastric cancer. However, just one database should be validated by other databases. There were several datasets have been proposed in public data using transcriptome data of gastric cancer tissues. I recommend that the authors analyze another database to convince their hypothesis. The authors presented the role of THPO on migration ability, but THPO also influences cell viability. Migration assay could be affected by cell viability, so the result of migration assay would be not clear to reflect the pure migratory ability of cancer cells.

• Funding: none.

REFERENCES

• ¹
  Zhou CL, Su HL, Dai HW. Thrombopoietin is associated with a prognosis of gastric adenocarcinoma. Rev Assoc Med Bras (1992). 2020;66(5):590-5. https://doi.org/10.1590/1806-9282.66.5.590
  » https://doi.org/10.1590/1806-9282.66.5.590

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  19 Nov 2021
• Date of issue
  Sept 2021

History

• Received
  11 Feb 2021
• Accepted
  14 Mar 2021