Prognostic role of galectins expression in patients with hepatic cancer: A meta-analysis

OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study was to illustrate the prognostic value of diversified galectins in patients with hepatic cancer via meta-analysis. METHODS: We conducted a systematic search on PubMed, Embase, The Cochrane Library, Web of Science, the Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) database, and Wanfang Data for studies that reported associations between galectin expression and the prognosis for hepatic cancer patients, from the inception of each database to March 20, 2019. The combined hazard ratio (HR) and 95% confidence interval (CI) were estimated to investigate the prognosis. RESULTS: We collected 11 studies of 1957 patients in our meta-analysis. The pooled results indicated that overall galectin expression was not correlated with OS (HR = 1.23, 95% CI = 0.84–1.79, P = .29) or DFS/RFS (HR = 0.808, 95% CI = 0.376–1.735, P = .42) in liver cancer patients. In stratified analyses, we observed that high galectin-1 and galectin-3 expression was significantly associated with poor OS. The pooled HR of galectin-4 and galectin-9 was correlated with improved OS. CONCLUSION: Our results indicate that the high expression of galectin-1 and -3 and the low expression of galectin-4 and -9 may be predictive prognostic factors for poor OS in liver cancer patients.