The diagnostic and prognostic significance of long noncoding RNAs expression in thyroid cancer: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

OBJECTIVE: Thyroid cancer (TC) is the most common malignant endocrine-related cancer with an increasing trend worldwide. Therefore, it's in urgent need to find new markers for prognosis and diagnosis. Many long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) have been reported to be aberrantly expressed in TC, and may serve as biomarkers. Therefore, we performed this meta-analysis to systematically summarize the relationship between lncRNA expressions and TC.

METHODS: Sources from PubMed, Embase and Web of Science were searched. A total of 16 eligible studies including 15 on clinicopahology, 5 on prognosis and 6 on diagnosis were enrolled in our meta-analysis. Revman5.3 and Stata11.0 Software were used to conduct the meta-analysis.

RESULTS: For diagnostic value, lncRNAs could discriminate between TC and the normal, and yield a high overall sensitivity and specificity (0.80, 95% CI: 0.75-0.84; 0.80, 95% CI: 0.70-0.87). Meanwhile, their sensitivity and specificity were 0.74 (95% CI: 0.59-0.85) and 0.81 (95% CI: 0.73-0.88) respectively, when used to differentiate patients with lymph node metastasis (LNM) from without LNM. The summary receiver operator characteristic curve (sROC) showed that lncRNAs could be considered as valuable diagnostic markers for distinguishing TC patients from the normal (AUC = 0.84) and TC patients with LNM from TC patients without LNM (AUC = 0.85).

CONCLUSIONS: In summary, our meta-analysis suggested that lncRNAs could function as potential diagnostic markers for TC and predict the LNM. In addition, the systematic review elaborated that lncRNAs might be as prognostic indicators in TC.