Prognostic and clinicopathological significance of MUC expression in head and neck cancer: a systematic review and meta-analysis.

Prognostic and clinicopathological significance of MUC expression in head and neck cancer: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Oncotarget. 2017 Jul 27;: Authors: Lu H, Liang D, Zhu Y, Xu W, Zhou K, Liu L, Liu S, Yang W Abstract The prognostic value of mucins expression in patients with head and neck cancer (HNC) remains controversial. To address this, a meta-analysis was performed to systematically evaluate prognostic significance of mucins expression in HNC. Electronic and manual searches were performed and a total of 20 studies including 2046 patients were selected for the final analysis. Increased mucins expression was associated with unfavorable overall survival in HNC patients (HR=1.83, 95% CI: 1.43-2.33, p=0.000). Mucins overexpression was also in correlation with more advanced TNM stage (RR=0.84, 95% CI: 0.73-0.97, p=0.017), higher risk of lymph node metastasis (RR=0.69, 95% CI: 0.57-0.84, p=0.000) and deeper invasion (RR=0.58, 95% CI: 0.44-0.76, p=0.000). These results suggested that elevated mucins expression was significantly associated with worse prognosis and more detrimental clinicopathological outcomes, revealing the promising potential of mucins as biomarkers for HNC management. PMID: 28775231 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Source: Oncotarget - Category: Cancer & Oncology Tags: Oncotarget Source Type: research