ZEB1 and neoplasm: Among the lncRNAs previously reported in HCC, we found that 6 (ANRIL, HEIH, HOTTIP, PCNA-AS1, UFC1 and ZEB-AS1) were elevated in all three hepatitis viruses-related tumor tissues (Additional file 7: Table S7, Additional file 8: Figure S1a, b, f–i), although some of them did not reach statistical significance, possibly due to the small number of samples analyzed.