Quantitative assessment of the association between APC promoter methylation and breast cancer

Adenomatous polyposis coli (APC) is an important tumor suppressor gene in breast cancer. However, there were inconsistent conclusions in the association between APC promoter methylation and breast cancer. Hence, we conducted a meta-analysis to quantitatively assess the clinicopathological significance and diagnosis role of APC methylation in breast cancer. In total, 3172 samples from 29 studies were performed in this study. The odds ratio (OR) of APC methylation was 5.92 (95% CI = 3.16–11.07) in breast cancer cases compared to controls,. The APC promoter methylation was associated with cancer stage (OR = 0.47, 95% CI = 0.28–0.80, P = 0.006), lymph node metastases (OR = 0.55, 95% CI = 0.36–0.84, P = 0.005) and ER status (OR = 1.34, 95% CI = 1.03–1.73, P = 0.003) in breast cancer. Furthermore, the sensitivity and specificity for all included studies were 0.444 (95% CI: 0.321–0.575, P < 0.0001) and 0.976 (95% CI: 0.916–0.993, P < 0.0001), respectively. These results suggested that APC promoter methylation was associated with breast cancer risk, and it could be a valuable biomarker for diagnosis, treatment and prognosis of breast cancer.