Prognostic and clinicopathologic significance of MicroRNA-125a-5p in cancers: A meta-analysis

The aim of the study was to estimate the prognostic and clinicopathologic significance of miR-125a-5p in human cancers. Eligible studies were obtained from PubMed, Embase, and the Cochrane Library. Combined hazard ratios (HRs) and odds ratios (ORs) were used to evaluate the prognostic and clinicopathologic value of miR-125a-5p. In pan-cancer, high miR-125a-5p expression was associated with better overall survival (OS) (HR = 0.459, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.369–0.57, P < .001), and disease-free survival (HR = 0.343, 95% CI: 0.237–0.496, P < .001). Furthermore, favorable OS was also found in lung cancer (HR = 0.343, 95% CI: 0.228–0.517, P < .001) and gastric cancer (HR = 0.341, 95% CI: 0.160–0.725, P = .005) patients with high miR-125a-5p expression. Besides, high miR-125a-5p expression was correlated with early stage (OR = 0.413, 95% CI: 0.228–0.749, P = .004) and negative lymph node metastasis (OR = 0.262, 95% CI: 0.073–0.941, P = .04) in gastric cancer, and was linked with better tumor differentiation in pan-cancer (OR = 1.623, 95% CI: 1.064–2.476, P = .025) and lung cancer (OR = 2.371, 95% CI: 1.358–4.141, P = .002). In conclusion, miR-125a-5p is a tumor suppressor with prognostic and clinicopathologic values for human cancer, and miR-125a-5p overexpression predicted favorable prognosis, early stage, negative lymph node metastasis, and better tumor differentiation. More research should be conducted to test these results.