MicroRNA-200 Family Profile: A Promising Ancillary Tool for Accurate Cancer Diagnosis

Cancer is one of the most threatening diseases in the world and great interests have been paid to discover accurate and noninvasive methods for cancer diagnosis. The value of microRNA-200 (miRNA-200, miR-200) family has been revealed in many studies. However, the results from various studies were inconsistent, and thus a meta-analysis was designed and performed to assess the overall value of miRNA200 in cancer diagnosis. Relevant studies were searched electronically from the following databases: PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, the Cochrane Library, and Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure. Keyword combined with "miR-200," "cancer," and "diagnosis" in any fields was used for searching relevant studies. Then, the pooled sensitivity, specificity, area under the curve (AUC), and partial AUC were calculated using the random-effects model. Heterogeneity among individual studies was also explored by subgroup analyses. A total of 28 studies from 18 articles with an overall sample size of 3676 subjects (2097 patients and 1579 controls) were included in this meta-analysis. The overall sensitivity and specificity with 95% confidence intervals (95% CIs) are 0.709 (95% CI: 0.657-0.755) and 0.667 (95% CI: 0.617-0.713), respectively. Additionally, AUC and partial AUC for the pooled data is 0.735 and 0.627, respectively. Subgroup analyses revealed that using miRNA-200 family for cancer diagnosis is more effective in white than in Asian ethnic groups. In addition, cancer diagnosis by miRNA using circulating specimen is more effective than that using noncirculating specimen. Finally, miRNA is more accurate in diagnosing endometrial cancer than other types of cancer, and some miRNA family members (miR-200b and miR-429) have superior diagnostic accuracy than other miR-200 family members. In conclusion, the profiling of miRNA-200 family is likely to be a valuable tool in cancer detection and diagnosis.