Diagnostic value of microRNA-148/152 family in non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC): A systematic review and meta-analysis

BACKGROUNDS: Non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is the most common type of lung cancer with extremely high morbidity and mortality. OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the diagnostic value of the blood miR-148/152 family to NSCLC by meta-analysis. METHODS: PubMed, Embase (via Ovid), The Cochrane Library, web of science, and Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure were retrieved using miR-148, miR-152, and NSCLC as search terms for studies about miR-148/152 family in the diagnosis of NSCLC, the quality assessment of diagnostic accuracy studies was adopted to evaluate the quality of literature, STATA 12.0 and Meta-Disc 1.4 were used to conduct meta-analysis and to probe the clinical utility (with plotting the Fagan Nomogram). RESULTS: A total 2145 cases in 8 trials published in 4 studies finally enrolled for final analysis. The area under the curve of the summary receiver operating characteristic was 0.87 [0.83–0.89], the pooled sensitivity was 0.79 [0.74, 0.83], the pooled specificity was 0.81 [0.76, 0.85] and the diagnosis odds ratio was 15.53 [10.88–22.17], the integrated positive likelihood ratio was 4.1 [3.30, 5.20] and the integrated negative likelihood ratio was 0.27 [0.22, 0.33]. CONCLUSION: Current evidence indicated that miR-148/152 family might be served as novel non-invasive diagnostic biomarkers for NSCLC diagnosis with good sensitivity and specificity. it still needs more research with high quality, large sample sizes, and multiple centers for further verification.