Background:Because of the high malignant degree of pancreatic cancer (PC), the early diagnosis of PC is of great concern. Macrophage inhibitory cytokine-1 (MIC-1) was reported to be a potential diagnostic biomarker, but its diagnostic value is indeterminate. Therefore, we performed this meta-analysis to compare it to carbohydrate antigen 19–9 (CA19–9), the most frequently used serum biomarker in PC.Material and Methods:After a systematic review of the relevant studies, the pooled diagnostic indices, including sensitivity, specificity, positive/negative likelihood ratio (PLR/NLR), diagnostic odds ratio (DOR), summary receiver operating characteristic curve (sROC), and area under the SROC curve (AUC) were used to evaluate the diagnostic value of MIC-1 and CA19–9 for PC. These indices were pooled with random-effects models. We explored the heterogeneity by meta-regression.Results:Fourteen studies comprising a total of 2826 subjects were included in our meta-analysis. The summary estimates for MIC-1 and CA19–9 are listed as follows: sensitivity, 80% [95% confidence interval (CI) 78–82] versus 71% (95% CI 68–73); specificity, 85% (95% CI 83–87) versus 88% (95% CI 86–90); DOR, 24.57 (95% CI 14.00–43.10) versus 17.65 (95% CI 11.65–26.76); area under sROC (AUC), 0.8945 versus 0.8322; PLR, 5.18 (95% CI 3.24–8.26) versus 5.34 (95% CI 3.78–7.54); and NLR, 0.23 (95% CI 0.19–0.29) versus 0.32 (95% CI 0.28–0.37).Conclusion:These data demonstrate that serum MIC-1 has a comparable diagnostic accuracy to CA19–9 for PC.

ABSTRACT. The diagnostic and prognostic value of miR-21 has been examined for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), with inconsistent results. Present meta-analysis summarized the diagnostic accuracy and the predictive role for survival of miR-21 in patients with HCC. All eligible studies were searched using PubMed, EMBASE, and Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) databases up to October 2014. For the diagnostic meta-analysis, the indices of miR-21 in the diagnosis of HCC were pooled using bivariate random-effect approach models. For the prognostic meta-analysis, data were synthesized with a random effect model, and the hazard ratio (HR) or odd ratio (OR) with its 95% confidence interval (95%CI) was used as the effect size estimate. Ten studies dealing with HCC were included. The overall pooled results for sensitivity, specificity, and the area under the curve (AUC) for the diagnostic meta-analysis (five studies) were 74. The combined data for the prognostic meta-analysis (seven studies) suggested that miR-21 overexpression in HCC correlated with poor overall survival [HR = 1.19 (95%CI = 0.44-1.94)], and higher miR-21 expression was associated with tumor, node, metastases (TNM) stage [OR = 0.34 (95%CI = 0.13-0.91)]. We concluded that miR-21 might be complementary to alpha fetal protein in HCC diagnosis, and might serve as an attractive estimator of HCC. We also demonstrated that miR-21 overexpression was associated with HCC TNM stage and with poor survival. As our study was limited, additional prospective studies are needed to validate these results.