Fig. 2.

Association between ΔCq of serum miRNAs and DC at 3 months after the initiation of sorafenib. Patients with DC were defined as patients with PR or SD for 3 months. Diamond and lines in the diamond indicate the means and 95% CIs of each subgroup; boxes and whiskers denote 75 and 95% distributions, and the lines in the boxes show median values, respectively. Dashed lines in each panel represent the mean value of all patients. p values between each group shown in the panels were calculated using Wilcoxon rank-sum test with Bonferroni correction. a ΔCq of serum miR-339-5p among the healthy control, patients with and without DC at 3 months after the initiation of sorafenib. p = 0.0742, F (2, 60) = 2.72 by ANOVA and p = 0.0341 by Kruskal-Wallis tests, respectively. b ΔCq of serum miR-181a-5p among the healthy control and patients with and without DC at 3 months after the initiation of sorafenib. p = 0.0048, F (2, 60) = 5.87 by ANOVA and p = 0.0032 by Kruskal-Wallis tests. In addition to the p values calculated using Wilcoxon rank-sum test with Bonferroni correction (p = 0.0150 and 0.0038 for DC vs. non-DC and control vs. non-DC, respectively), the p values by post hoc Tukey-Kramer test are also shown in parentheses (p = 0.0349 and 0.0180 for DC vs. non-DC and control vs. non-DC, respectively).