Diagnostic and prognostic value of microRNA-486 in patients with lung cancer: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

Purpose: There are conflicting opinions on whether miR-486 could be used for cancer diagnosis and prognosis. Therefore, this present study investigated the potential effect of miR-486 on lung cancer diagnosis and prognosis.

Methods: We researched PubMed, Embase, Wanfang and Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure databases to select relevant publications. Specificity and sensitivity were obtained for the pooled and subgroup diagnostic meta-analysis while the hazard ratio was for prognostic meta-analysis. Publication analyses and sensitivity analyses were conducted to investigate possible sources of heterogeneity.

Results: The overall sensitivity and specificity with 95% confidence intervals were 0.8 (0.8-0.9) and 0.9 (0.9-0.9). Results of subgroup analysis showed that high diagnostic efficacy might be obtained by miR-486 combined with other microRNAs (area under the curve (AUC): 0.9 (0.9-1.0)) to distinguish lung cancer patients from healthy controls (AUC: 1.0 (0.9-1.0)), especially for lung adenocarcinoma (AUC: 1.0 (1.0-1.0)) in the Asian population (AUC: 0.9 (0.9-1.0)). For prognosis prediction of miR-486 in overall non-small cell lung cancer, the overall hazard ratio with 95% confidence interval was 1.15 (0.85-1.54) for high versus low expression of miR-486, which indicated that a high miR-486 level was not related to the high risk of poor outcome. However, for the subgroup of progression-free survival and patients with chemotherapy, the hazard ratio was 0.41 (0.21-0.77), indicating that the higher miR-486 level would decrease the risk of poor progression-free survival for lung cancer patients with chemotherapy.

Conclusion: This study suggested circulating miR-486 combined with other microRNAs could be used as ideal biomarkers in early diagnosis and prognosis prediction for lung cancer, especially for lung adenocarcinoma in the Asian population.