Urine BLCA-4 exerts potential role in detecting patients with bladder cancers: a pooled analysis of individual studies

Epidemiological studies have explored the diagnostic effect of urine BLCA-4 in bladder cancer. However, the results remain controversial. Therefore, we conducted this pooled analyses to determine the overall accuracy of urine BLCA-4 in bladder cancer. A comprehensive electronic and hand search was conducted for related literatures though several databases. QUADAS-2 was used to assess the quality of each included studies. Diagnostic parameters were calculated using Meta-Disc (version 1.4) and Stata (version 12.0) software. Nine published articles with 1,119 subjects were included. The summary estimates were: sensitivity 0.93 (95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.90-0.95), specificity 0.97 (95% CI, 0.95-0.98), positive likelihood ratio 48.16 (95% CI, 11.77-197.01), negative likelihood ratio 0.08 (95% CI, 0.06-0.11), diagnostic odds ratio 534.03 (95% CI, 150.15-1899.31), and the AUC was 0.9607. In conclusion, urine BLCA-4 is a promising marker in diagnosing bladder cancer.