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Insights into the application of let-7 family as promising biomarker in cancer screening

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Tumor Biology

Abstract

Cancer is a leading cause of death worldwide with its low 5-year survival rate. Studies on the accuracy of let-7 family for human cancers have inconsistent conclusions, leading us to conduct this meta-analysis. This meta-analysis comprised of 11 studies from eight articles involving 805 cancer patients and 483 controls. The pooled parameters were as follows: sensitivity, 77 % (95 % confidence interval (CI) 73–81 %); specificity, 80 % (95 % CI 68–88 %); positive likelihood ratio (PLR), 3.8; negative likelihood ratio (NLR), 0.29; and diagnostic odds ratio (DOR) 13.0. In addition, we plotted the SROC and calculated the area under the curve (AUC) of 0.81 (95 % CI 0.78–0.84), which indicated a relatively high descriptive accuracy. In summary, our data suggested that let-7 family might be applied in noninvasive screening tests for human cancers, which needed to be validated in further large-scale studies.

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Conflicts of interest

There is no financial/other relationship to be declared.

Declaration of funding

This work was supported by Shenyang Municipal Science and Technology Program Funded Projects (No. F 12-278-6-09), Science and Technology Project of Liaoning Province (No. 2012029), and Liaoning Medical Peak Construction Engineering Projects (No. 2011415052-3).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The First Affiliated Hospital of China Medical University, Shenyang, 110001, China

    Ying Dai, Xin Tian, Li Zhang, Chengguang Sui, Fandong Meng, Shengyi Jiang, Yunpeng Liu & Youhong Jiang

  2. Health and Family Planning Commission, Shenyang, Liaoning Province, China

    Daqing Wang

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  1. Ying Dai
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Correspondence to Youhong Jiang.

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Dai, Y., Wang, D., Tian, X. et al. Insights into the application of let-7 family as promising biomarker in cancer screening. Tumor Biol. 36, 5233–5239 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13277-015-3180-1

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