BACKGROUND: Increasing research evidence indicates that microRNA-92a plays a significant role in the clinical prognosis of colorectal cancer, but this evidence is controversial. The present meta-analysis comprehensively generalizes the existing results and estimates the prognostic and clinicopathological influence of microRNA-92a in colorectal cancer.

MATERIAL AND METHODS: All available studies were obtained from PubMed, Embase, CBM, and CNKI by different retrieval methods and the data on overall survival and clinicopathologic feature were extracted from included studies. Eventually, the pooled HR, OR, and 95% CI were evaluated to assess the prognostic effect of microRNA-92a in patients with colorectal cancer.

RESULTS: There were altogether 6 qualified articles with 695 patients in this meta-analysis, and the research shows that increased microRNA-92a levels are capable of predicting worse overall survival (HR=2.91, 95% CI: 1.16–7.29, P=0.02) in colorectal cancer patients. Moreover, regarding clinicopathologic characteristics, odds ratios (OR) showed that elevated microRNA-92a was distinctly associated with depth of tumor invasion (OR=1.79, 95% CI: 1.04–3.07, P=0.04), TNM stage (OR=2.45, 95% CI: 1.42–4.24, P=0.001), distant metastasis (OR=4.71, 95% CI: 1.74–12.69, P=0.002), and lymph node metastasis (OR=2.90, 95% CI: 1.64–5.13, P=0.0003). However, high expression of microRNA-92a was negatively correlated with sex and tumor differentiation, with pooled OR of 1.01 (95% CI: 0.6–1.69, P=0.97) and 0.66 (95% CI: 0.33–1.30, P=0.23), respectively.

CONCLUSIONS: Our research reveals that up-regulated microRNA-92a is able to predict poor survival outcomes and worse clinicopathologic features.

Keywords: Colorectal Neoplasms