MicroRNA-18a as a promising biomarker for cancer detection: a meta-analysis

Patients with cancer discovered at an early stage have relatively high survival rates. Increasing researches have shown the potential of detecting dysregulated microRNA-18a (miR-18a) to diagnose cancer. However, non-uniform results in previous studies were found. Thus, this meta-analysis was conducted to further explore the clinical applicability of miR-18a as an ideal biomarker for cancer detection. Suitable articles were obtained from online databases like PubMed, Embase, Cochrane, CBM and Wanfang. The Quality Assessment of Diagnostic Accuracy Studies-2 (QUADAS-2) tool was used to evaluate the quality of our meta-analysis. The pooled diagnostic parameters like specificity, sensitivity, diagnostic odds ratio (DOR), positive and negative likelihood ratios (PLR and NLR) and area under the summary receiver operator characteristic curve (SROC) were pooled to assess the entire test accuracy. Overall, 10 studies from 9 articles, including 979 patients with cancer and 713 healthy controls were involved in our meta-analysis. The pooled sensitivity was 0.78 (95% CI: 0.70-0.84) and the corresponding specificity was 0.82 (95% CI: 0.73-0.89). The merged PLR was 4.3 (95% CI: 2.8-6.8), NLR was 0.27 (95% CI: 0.20-0.37), and DOR was 16 (95% CI: 8-31). The pooled AUC was 0.86 (95% CI: 0.83-0.89). Our meta-analysis suggested that miR-18a might open up a new field for novel clinical cancer screening with the merits of high accuracy, non-invasiveness, convenience and cheap cost. However, more reliable studies in larger cohort should be conducted before it is used.