The clinical utility of microRNA-21 as novel biomarker for diagnosing human cancers

Abstract

With cancer being a major cause of death worldwide, microRNAs (miRNAs) have been investigated as novel and non-invasive biomarkers for cancer diagnosis. Recently, microRNA-21 (miR-21) attracts much attention for its aberrant expression and has been widely studied in various cancers. However, the inconsistent results from studies make it hard to evaluate the diagnostic value of miR-21 in cancer diagnosis, which lead us to conduct this meta-analysis. We conducted a comprehensive literature search in the Medline, Embase, PubMed, CNKI, and Web of Science before July 1, 2014. STATA 12.0 software was used for calculation and statistical analysis. The pooled sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative likelihood ratio (PLR, NLR), and diagnostic odds ratio (DOR) were used to assess the diagnostic performance of miR-21 for cancers. Seventy-three studies in 60 articles were involved in this meta-analysis, with a total of 4684 patients with cancer and 3108 controls. The overall parameters were calculated from all the included studies: sensitivity of 0.78 (95% confidence interval (CI) 0.74-0.81), specificity of 0.83 (95% CI 0.80-0.86), PLR of 4.5 (95% CI 3.8-5.4), NLR of 0.27 (95% CI 0.23-0.32); DOR of 17 (95% CI 12-23), and area under the curve (AUC) of 0.88 (95% CI 0.84-0.90). In addition, we performed subgroup analyses based on ethnicity, cancer types, and sample types. Results from subgroup analysis showed that cancer types and sample types were the sources of heterogeneity in our meta-analysis. The overall diagnostic value of miR-21 is not very high for cancer diagnosis; however, it is affected significantly by the types of cancer and specimen. MiR-21 has a relatively high diagnostic value for detecting breast cancer, and miR-21 assays based on plasma, serum, and tissue achieved relatively higher accuracy.

MicroRNA-21 as a potential diagnostic biomarker for breast cancer patients: a pooled analysis of individual studies

“…In our meta-analysis, the pooled sensitivity and specificity were 0.72 and 0.80, which indicated that the diagnostic accuracy may not be high enough as expected. The results were consistent with the recently published studies by Li et al and Shen et al [27, 28]. However, compared with some traditional biomarkers, such as CEA, NSE (with sensitivities of 0.48 and 0.39), miR-21 still had higher diagnostic value in detecting breast cancer.…”

Pilot Study of Serum MicroRNA-21 as a Diagnostic and Prognostic Biomarker in Egyptian Breast Cancer Patients

“…Other investigators reported high sensitivity and specificity of circulatory miR-21 for detecting other types of cancer, including gastric, esophageal, colorectal, pancreatic, lung, prostate, and ovarian cancer [33,34,[48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55]. Moreover, in a meta-analysis conducted on 73 studies with different cancers, the most identified cancer by miR-21 assay was BC, with 84 % specificity and 86 % sensitivity [56]. Taken together, these results held the point that miR-21 could serve as a potential broad-spectrum biomarker for cancer.…”

Role of plasma MicroRNAs in the early diagnosis of non-small-cell lung cancers: a case-control study

“…Some studies reported that plasma tumor markers with high concentrations are often found only when the disease is at an late stage (16)(17)(18)(19). Therefore, it is difficult to detect a lung tumor clinically at an early stage with plasma marker assays (20,21).…”