Clinical value of lncRNA ZFAS1 in various cancers: an updated meta-analysis of 2263 cancer patients

Abstract

Background: LncRNA ZNFX1 antisense RNA 1 (ZFAS1) is largely reported to be abnormally expressed in various human cancers and associated with unfavorable prognosis. So this study aims to further investigate its clinical value in multifarious cancers.Methods: Databases of PubMed, Web of science, Cochrane library, Embase, Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure and Wanfang was retrieved to collect eligible studies until October 22, 2020. The clinical role of ZFAS1 was comprehensively assessed by STATA 12.0. Additionally, the CeRNA network in which ZFAS1 involved was constructed. And function analysis of targeted mRNAs was performed by R package “cluster profiler”.Results: 23 studies of 2263 cancer patients met the inclusion criteria in this meta-analysis. The comprehensive results suggested that patients with elevated ZFAS1 expression got poor overall survival (OS) (HR=1.80, 95%CI: 1.50-2.10, P≤0.001), and they are prone to lymph node metastasis (OR=2.67, 95%CI: 1.73-4.14, P≤0.001), distant metastasis (DM) (OR=3.45, 95%CI: 1.61-7.39, P=0.001), advanced TNM stage (HTS) (OR=2.99, 95%CI: 1.97-4.54, P≤0.001), larger tumor size (LTS) (OR=1.54, 95%CI: 1.05-2.24, P≤0.001), poor histologic grade (PHG) (OR=1.57, 95%CI: 1.09-2.26, P=0.015). The CeRNA network and function analysis revealed the potential mechanism which ZFAS1 may involve in cancers.Conclusion: The current analysis revealed that elevated ZFAS1 expression is common in various cancer and was significantly associated with poor OS and clinical characteristics, thus it may function as prognostic biomarker in various cancer. Nevertheless, larger well-designed clinical research a is still warranted to verify our findings.