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. 2020 Jun 22:20:260.
doi: 10.1186/s12935-020-01350-4. eCollection 2020.

Biomarker implication of kallikrein-related peptidases as prognostic tissue substrates of poor survival in colorectal cancer

Qiliang Peng #  1   2 , Yi Shen #  3 , Peifeng Zhao #  1   2 , Ming Cheng  4 , Yongyou Wu  4 , Yaqun Zhu  1   2
Affiliations

Biomarker implication of kallikrein-related peptidases as prognostic tissue substrates of poor survival in colorectal cancer

Qiliang Peng et al. Cancer Cell Int. .

Abstract

Background: Recent studies have demonstrated that the kallikrein and kallikrein-related peptidases (KLKs) exhibit aberrant expression in patients with colorectal cancer (CRC) and might be considered as potential prognostic biomarkers of CRC. However, inconsistent findings have been reported, which promote us to summarize the global prognostic roles of KLKs for survival in CRC patients.

Methods: Eligible published studies were identified by searching electronic databases with several search strategies. The patients' baseline characteristics and survival results were extracted from enrolled studies and pooled as combined hazard ratio (HR) with 95% confidence interval (95% CI) to estimate the effect size.

Results: A total of 25 and 22 eligible studies were included in the meta-analysis to evaluate the prognostic roles of KLKs on overall survival (OS) and disease-free survival (DFS), respectively. KLKs overexpression was significantly associated with worse OS (pooled HR = 1.43, 95% CI 1.27-1.60, P < 0.001) and short DFS (pooled HR = 1.35, 95% CI 1.21-1.51, P < 0.001). Importantly, subgroup and meta-regression analyses revealed the survival differences among different races and detection methods of KLKs. Furthermore, several specific members of KLKs were identified to be more significantly related to worse OS and DFS compared with other members.

Conclusion: The present study demonstrated that KLKs may have the potential to serve as promising biomarkers to monitor CRC prognosis and progression. The promising results concerning the utility of KLKs in clinical practice encourage the further investigation of their clinical utility applicability as tumor markers of CRC.

Keywords: Biomarker; Colorectal cancer; Kallikrein; Prognosis.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing interestsThe authors declare they have no competing interest.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Flow diagram of the study selection process
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Forest plots of the correlation between KLKs expression level and CRC prognosis. a Forest plot of DFS; b forest plot of OS
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Begg’s funnel plots for the assessment of publication bias in the meta-analysis. a Funnel plot of the studies for DFS. b Funnel plot of the studies for OS
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
Sensitivity analysis of the meta-analysis. a Sensitivity analysis for DFS; b sensitivity analysis for OS
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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