Diagnostic efficacy of long non-coding RNA in lung cancer: a systematic review and meta-analysis

The detection of long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) is a novel method for lung cancer diagnosis. However, the diagnostic efficacy of lncRNA in different studies is inconsistent. Therefore, we conducted this meta-analysis to elucidate the diagnostic efficacy of lncRNA in identification of lung cancer including small cell lung cancer. The online PubMed, Medline, EMBASE, CNKI and Wanfang literature databases were searched to identify all related articles about the diagnostic efficacy of lncRNA for lung cancer. 28 articles including 3044 patients with lung cancer and 2598 controls were enrolled in our meta-analysis. lncRNA sustained a high diagnostic efficacy, pooled sensitivity of 0.82 (95% CI 0.79 to 0.84), specificity of 0.82 (95% CI 0.78 to 0.84) and area under the curve (AUC) of 0.88 (95% CI 0.85 to 0.91) in identification of patients with lung cancer from controls. Furthermore, the diagnostic efficacy of paralleled lncRNA was better than single lncRNA (sensitivity: 0.86 vs 0.80; specificity: 0.88 vs 0.78; AUC: 0.93 vs 0.86). MALAT1 had a better diagnostic efficacy than GAS5 (AUC: 0.90 vs 0.81; sensitivity: 0.83 vs 0.70; specificity: 0.83 vs 0.78). lncRNA in tissues was observed to achieve lower diagnostic efficacy than that in plasma or serum (AUC: 0.87 vs 0.90 vs 0.90) when stratified by sample types. In summary, our meta-analysis suggests that lncRNA might be a promising biomarker(s) for identifying lung cancer and the combination of lncRNA or with other biomarkers had a better diagnostic efficacy.