Diagnostic accuracy of serum glypican-3 for hepatocellular carcinoma: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Abstract

Objective: Many individual studies have evaluated the diagnostic efficiency of serum glypican-3 (GPC-3) for diagnosing hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), but the results have been inconsistent. The aim of present study was to meta-analyze the overall diagnostic accuracy of serum GPC-3 for diagnosing HCC.

Design and methods: English language studies which evaluated the diagnostic performance of GPC-3 and published before March 22, 2013 were retrieved. The quality of the studies was assessed by revised QUADAS tools. The performance characteristics were pooled and determined by random-effects models.

Results: Twelve studies with a total of 898 HCC patients and 835 non-HCC patients were included. For the studies in which the majority of reference participants had HBV or HCV infections, the overall diagnostic sensitivity and specificity were 0.53 (95% CI: 0.49-0.57) and 0.77 (95% CI: 0.74-0.81), respectively. The area under summary receiver operating characteristic (sROC) curves (AUC) was 0.82. The major design deficiencies of included studies were differential verification bias, and a lack of clear exclusion and inclusion criteria.

Conclusions: GPC-3 has moderate diagnostic accuracy for HCC. Due to the design limitations, results in published studies should be carefully interpreted. In addition, more well-designed studies with large sample sizes should be performed to rigorously evaluate the diagnostic value of the GPC-3.

Keywords: Diagnostic value; Glypican-3; Hepatocellular carcinoma; Systematic review.