MiR-193b as an effective biomarker in human cancer prognosis for Asian patients: a meta-analysis

BACKGROUND: MiR-193b has been widely investigated in the last few years and an aberrant association has been observed between its expression levels and the prognosis of several human malignancies. We performed a meta-analysis to evaluate the prognostic effect of miR-193b on human cancers. METHODS: PMC, PubMed, Web of Science (WOS), Embase in English and VIP, Wanfang, SinoMed and the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) in Chinese were searched up to May 16, 2020. The pooled hazard ratio (HR) with a 95% confidence interval (CI) was calculated to evaluate its prognosis in human cancers. Also, the pooled odd ratios and the relevant 95% CIs were computed to assess the association of miR-193b levels and clinicopathological characteristics of cancer patients. RESULTS: In overall analysis, a significant association was identified between miR-193b levels and overall survival (HR =0.77, 95% CI: 0.64–0.92), but this association was not significant in the random pooling model. Then, two outliers were identified through sensitivity analysis. After removing outliers, the significant association was identified with random pooling model (HR =0.45, 95% CI: 0.30–0.69). In addition, the significance exited among Asian (HR =0.45, 95% CI: 0.28–0.74), studies with the sample size (≥100) (HR =0.39, 95% CI: 0.27–0.56) and sample size (<100) (HR =0.51, 95% CI: 0.28–0.92), Newcastle-Ottawa scale (NOS) scores (≥8) (HR =0.44, 95% CI: 0.30–0.67) and NOS scores (<8) (HR =0.45, 95% CI: 0.25–0.80) and patients of non-digestive carcinoma (HR =0.35, 95% CI: 0.24–0.52), digestive carcinoma (HR =0.54, 95% CI: 0.31–0.92), non-urogenital carcinoma (HR =0.52, 95% CI: 0.33–0.82) or urogenital carcinoma (HR =0.28, 95% CI: 0.16–0.50). Lower expression of miR-193b was found to be related to larger tumor size and the potential of lymph node metastasis and distance metastasis. DISCUSSION: We have demonstrated that miR-193b serves as an ideal biomarker in the cancer prognosis for Asian patients, and the low expression levels of miR-193b is significantly associated with poor overall survival rates in various human malignancies. Moreover, the patients with lower miR-193b tend to develop the cancers with higher potential of metastasis.