MicroRNA-145 as ideal biomarker for the diagnosis of various carcinomas

Increasing evidences indicated that microRNAs (miRNAs) can serve as a noninvasive biomarker with a high sensitivity and specificity for the early diagnosis of various cancers, among which, microRNA-145 (miRNA-145, miR-145) was verified to have strong relationship to irregular apoptosis, thus making it useful in the early detection of cancers. However, contradictory results on its diagnostic accuracy and reliability are still existed in individual studies. Therefore, we conducted this meta-analysis of the relevant published literatures to systematically evaluate the diagnostic value of miR-145 in the prediction of cancers. The sensitivity and specificity of the included studies were used to construct the summary receiver operator characteristic (SROC) curve and calculate the area under the SROC curve (AUC). All analyses were performed using the STATA 12.0 software. Thirteen studies from nine articles were involved in our meta-analysis. The pooled parameters calculated from all studies are as follows: sensitivity, 0.71 (95% confidence interval (CI) 0.59-0.81); specificity, 0.75 (95% CI 0.66-0.83); positive likelihood ratio (PLR), 2.9 (95% CI 1.9-4.4); negative likelihood ratio (NLR), 0.38 (95% CI 0.25-0.58); and diagnostic odds ratio (DOR), 8 (95% CI 3-17). In addition, subgroup analyses based on ethnicity suggested that miR-145 as a biomarker on the detection of cancers for Caucasian population showed a higher sensitivity and specificity than for Asian population. In conclusion, the current meta-analysis showed that miR-145 holds a high accuracy in distinguishing cancer patients from healthy controls with noninvasiveness and high efficiency. However, large-scale prospective studies and additional improvements are urgently needed to confirm our findings and its utilization for routine clinical diagnosis in future.