Diagnostic value of circulating miR-21: An update meta-analysis in various cancers and validation in endometrial cancer

// Yun Gao 1, * , Meiyu Dai 1, * , Haihua Liu 1 , Wangjiao He 1 , Shengzhang Lin 1 , Tianzhu Yuan 2 , Hong Chen 3 , Shengming Dai 1 1 Medical Science Laboratory, The Fourth Affiliated Hospital of Guangxi Medical University, Liuzhou, Guangxi 545005, China 2 Department of Thoracic Surgery, The Fourth Affiliated Hospital of Guangxi Medical University, Liuzhou, Guangxi 545005, China 3 Department of Haematology, The Fourth Affiliated Hospital of Guangxi Medical University, Liuzhou, Guangxi 545005, China * These authors have contributed equally to this work Correspondence to: Shengming Dai, email: daishm@sina.com Keywords: miR-21, cancers, meta-analysis, diagnosis, endometrial carcinoma Received: March 30, 2016      Accepted: September 02, 2016      Published: September 15, 2016 ABSTRACT MiR-21 has been identified as one of the most common proto-oncogenes. It is hypothesized that up-regulated miR-21 could be served as a potential biomarker for human cancer diagnosis. However, inconsistencies or discrepancies about diagnostic accuracy of circulating miR-21 still remain. In this sense, miR-21's diagnostic value needs to be fully validated. In this study, we performed an update meta-analysis to estimate the diagnostic value of circulating miR-21 in various human cancers. Additionally, we conducted a validation test on 50 endometrial cancer patients, 50 benign lesion patients and 50 healthy controls. A systematical literature search for relevant articles was performed in Pubmed, Embase and Cochrane Library. A total of 48 studies from 39 articles, involving 3,568 cancer patients and 2,248 controls, were included in this meta-analysis. The overall sensitivity, specificity, positive likelihood ratio (PLR), negative likelihood ratio (NLR), diagnostic odds ratio (DOR) and area under the curve (AUC) were 0.76 (0.71-0.80), 0.82 (0.79-0.85), 4.3 (3.6-5.1), 0.29 (0.24-0.35), 15 (11-20) and 0.86 (0.83-0.89), respectively. In the validation test, the expression levels of serum miR-21 were significantly higher in benign lesion patients ( p = 0.003) and endometrial cancer patients ( p = 0.000) compared with that of healthy controls. Endometrial cancer patients showed higher miR-21 expression levels ( p = 0.000) compared with benign lesion patients. In conclusion, the meta-analysis shows that circulating miR-21 has excellent performance on the diagnosis for various cancers and the validation test demonstrates that serum miR-21 could be served as a novel biomarker for endometrial carcinoma.