Statistical analysis
Data collection was conducted in triplicate, with the outcomes represented as the mean ± SD. Statistical evaluation of RT-qPCR findings from HCC tissues and their corresponding tissues utilized a paired Student’s t-test. To identify statistical variations in the remaining data, we employed either an unpaired Student’s t-test or a one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) accompanied by Tukey’s post-hoc test. Kaplan-Meier analysis accompanied by a log-rank test was adopted to ascertain differences in overall survival (OS) between the two groups of patients. GraphPad Prism 6.0 (GraphPad Software, Inc.) facilitated the statistical computations. A P value of less than 0.05 was seen as statistically consequential.