Prognostic Significance of Beclin-1 Expression in Colorectal Cancer: a Meta-analysis

Abstract

Objective: Beclin-1 has recently been observed as an essential marker of autophagy in several cancers. However, the prognostic role of Beclin-1 in colorectal neoplasia remains controversial. Our study aimed to evaluate the potential association between Beclin-1 expression and the outcome of colorectal cancer patients. Materials and Methods: All related studies were systematically searched in Pubmed, Embase, Springer and Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure databases (CNKI), and then a meta-analysis was performed to determine the association of Beclin-1 expression with clinical outcomes. Finally, a total of 6 articles were included in our analysis. Results: Our data showed that high Beclin-1 expression in patients with CRC was associated with poor prognosis in terms of tumor distant metastasis (OR=2.090, 95%CI=1.061-4.119, p=0.033) and overall survival (RR=1.422, 95%CI=1.032-1.959, p=0.031). However, we did not found any correlation between Beclin-1 over-expression and tumor differentiation (OR=1.711, 95%CI=0.920-3.183, p=0.090). In addition, there was no evidence of publication bias as suggested by Egger's tests for tumor distant metastasis (p=1.000), differentiation (p=1.000) and OS (p=0.308). Conclusions: Our present meta-analysis indicated that elevated Beclin-1 expression iss associated with tumor metastasis and a poor prognosis in patients with CRC. Beclin-1 might serve as an efficient prognostic indicator in CRC, and could be a new molecular target in CRC therapy.

Loss of beclin 1 expression in ovarian cancer: A potential biomarker for predicting unfavorable outcomes

“…Multiple previous studies have demonstrated comparable data in line with the present study, in that the loss of BECN1 was reported to be associated with an unfavorable prognosis of several solid cancers, including ovarian carcinoma (15,(25)(26)(27). In contrast, other studies demonstrated that the loss of BECN1 was significantly correlated with improved survival in patients with endometrial cancer, renal cell cancer, and colorectal cancer (28)(29)(30). These differences may be due to a lack of consistency between studies and/or variations in methodologies, or may be disease-specific.…”

Autophagy in colorectal cancer: An important switch from physiology to pathology

“…Overexpression of BECN1 in patients with resected stage Ⅱ and Ⅲ colon carcinomas who were treated with 5FUbased adjuvant therapy was associated with worse overall survival, supporting a role for autophagy in drug resistance [85] . Moreover, in a metaanalysis, overexpression of BECN1 was associated with a poor prognosis and metastasis in patients with CRC [86] .…”

Relationships of Colorectal Cancer with Dietary Factors and Public Health Indicators: an Ecological Study

“…Nowadays, evidence showed that CRC is a genetic disease and 10-15 % of CRC cases have genetic cause so that one out of 200 individuals has genetic high risk allele for CRC (Fernandez et al, 2002;Turati et al, 2013;Han et al, 2014).…”