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Meta-Analysis
. 2019 Jul 15;19(1):691.
doi: 10.1186/s12885-019-5917-5.

Prognostic value of TGF-β in lung cancer: systematic review and meta-analysis

Jue Li  1 , Cheng Shen  1 , Xin Wang  1 , Yutian Lai  1 , Kun Zhou  1 , Pengfei Li  1 , Lunxu Liu  1 , Guowei Che  2
Affiliations
Meta-Analysis

Prognostic value of TGF-β in lung cancer: systematic review and meta-analysis

Jue Li et al. BMC Cancer. .

Abstract

Background: Lung cancer is the most important cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide and the overall survival of patients with non-small cell lung cancer has not improved. Transforming growth factor beta or TGF-β is a polypeptide member of the transforming growth factor beta superfamily of cytokines, while far fewer clinical studies addressing the association between TGF-β expression and the disease prognosis have been reported up to now. Therefore, our meta-analysis aims to determine the prognostic significance of TGF-β expression in lung cancer patients.

Methods: PubMed, EMBASE, the Web of Science and China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) databases were searched for full-text literature citations. We applied the hazard ratio (HR) with 95% confidence interval (CI) as the appropriate summarized statistics. Q-test and I2 statistic were used to estimate the level of heterogeneity. The publication bias was detected by Begg's test and Egger's test.

Results: Eight eligible studies involving 579 patients were selected for this meta-analysis. The combined HR for the eight eligible studies was 2.17 (95% CI: 1.71-2.77, P < 0.00001) and heterogeneity of overall prognosis was relatively low (I2 = 14.2%, P = 0.319). We further undertook the subgroup analysis including assessment of the association between TGF-β expression and pathology of the lung cancer, treatment and quantity of sample in studies. All the results revealed that a significantly high TGF-β expression in patients was an indicator of poor survival. Neither Begg's test nor Egger's test found publication bias in any analysis.

Conclusions: The present evidence indicates that TGF-β expression can significantly predict the worse prognosis in patients with lung cancer. The findings of our meta-analysis may be confirmed in the future by the use of more updated review pooling and additional relevant investigations.

Keywords: Lung cancer; Meta-analysis; Prognosis; TGF-β.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Flow chart of study selection in this meta-analysis
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Forest plots of the eight evaluable studies assessing the prognostic value of TGF-β in lung cancer. CI Confidence intervals, HR Hazard ratio
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Pooled HRs for assessing of the association between TGF-β expression and pathology of the lung cancer. HR, hazard ratio, CI Confidence interval, ADC Adenocarcinoma, NM Not mentioned, ES Effect size
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
Pooled HRs for assessing of the association between TGF-β expression and treatment. HR Hazard ratio, CI Confidence interval, ES Effect size
Fig. 5
Fig. 5
Pooled HRs for assessing of the association between TGF-β expression and quantity of sample in studies. HR Hazard ratio, CI Confidence interval, ES Effect size
Fig. 6
Fig. 6
Egger’s publication bias plot
Fig. 7
Fig. 7
Funnel plots of publication bias on the correlation between TGF-β expression and overall survival
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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