The expression of histone deacetylase HDAC1 correlates with the progression and prognosis of gastrointestinal malignancy

Gastrointestinal malignancy is a severe public health threat worldwide, and survival for most types of gastrointestinal cancer is very poor. Therefore, finding better cancer biomarkers to diagnose gastrointestinal malignancy and predict patient survival is essential. HDAC1 has been reported to be closely associated with several types of cancer, but the precise role of HDAC1 in gastrointestinal cancer is not clear. Recently, quite a few studies have investigated the correlation between HDAC1 expression and clinical features or prognosis in multiple types of gastrointestinal malignancies, but the results were inconsistent. In this study, we systematically reviewed the association between HDAC1 and gastrointestinal malignancy using meta-analysis methods, and 28 eligible studies were analyzed. We found that the expression level of HDAC1 in gastrointestinal malignancies, especially in colorectal cancer (OR = 10.84, 95% CI = 5.33–22.07, P< 0.00001), was higher than that in noncancerous tissue, and HDAC1 expression was closely associated with some clinical features of gastrointestinal cancer patients, such as tumor stage (OR = 1.62, 95% CI = 1.28–2.05, P < 0.0001) and tumor grade (OR = 1.75, 95% CI = 1.03–2.95, P = 0.04). In addition, we also found that patients with low HDAC1 expression showed better overall survival than those with high HDAC1 expression in gastrointestinal malignancy, especially in gastric cancer (HR = 1.88, 95% CI = 1.14–3.12, P = 0.01). Our results strongly suggest that HDAC1 may serve as a good diagnostic and prognostic marker for gastrointestinal malignancy.