Overexpression of stathmin promotes metastasis and growth of malignant solid tumors: a systemic review and meta-analysis

// Rong Biaoxue 1 , Liu Hua 2 , Gao Wenlong 3 , Yang Shuanying 4 1 Department of Respiratory Medicine, First Affiliated Hospital, Xi’an Medical University, Xi’an, China 2 Department of Respiratory Medicine, Gansu Provincial Hospital, Lanzhou, China 3 Department of Statistics and Epidemiology, Medical College, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, China 4 Department of Respiratory Medicine, Second Affiliated Hospital, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, China Correspondence to: Rong Biaoxue, email: research568rbx@yeah.net Keywords: stathmin, tumors, immunohistochemistry, meta-analysis, diagnosis Received: July 20, 2016 Accepted: October 22, 2016 Published: October 27, 2016 ABSTRACT Stathmin has been investigated to be involved in development and progress of malignant tumors. This study was to clarify the relationship between expression of stathmin and tumors and assess its clinical significance. We identified 25 studies with a total of 3,571 individuals from the electronic bibliographic databases and strictly evaluated the quality and heterogeneity of included studies. We analysed the relationship between expression of stathmin and clinical characteristics by the fixed-effects and random-effects of meta-analysis and constructed a summary receiver-operator characteristic curve to estimate the test characteristics. The results showed that patients with cancer displayed a higher stathmin expression than those of non-cancer individuals (OR, 0.31), and overexpression of stathmin correlated with tumor cell differentiation (OR, 0.73), lymph node invasion (OR, 0.80) and high TNM stage (OR, 0.67). The pooled sensitivity of stathmin for distinguishing malignant tumors was 0.73 and the specificity was 0.77. The maximum balance joint for sensitivity and specificity (the Q -value) was 0.7566 and the area under the curve (AUC) was 0.8234. In conclusion, these results showed that overexpression of stathmin intimately correlated with malignant behavior of tumors, suggesting it could be a risk factor of malignant tumors. Stathmin had great sensitivity and specificity indicated it should be a significant molecular biomarker for malignant tumors.