Abstract
Urothelial cancer associated 1 (UCA1) as an oncogenic long non-coding RNA (LncRNA) was aberrantly upregulated in various solid tumors. Numerous studies have demonstrated overexpression of UCA1 is an unfavorable prognostic indicator in cancer patients. This study aimed to further explore the prognosis role and clinical significance of UCA1 in cancer. Eligible studies were recruited by a systematic search in PubMed, Embase, Cochrane Library and Web of Science databases. A total of 19/16 studies with 1587/1291 cancer patients were included to evaluate the association between UCA1 expression and overall survival (OS) and clinicopathological factors of malignancies by computing hazard ratio (HR), odds ratios (OR) and confidence interval (CI). The meta-analysis indicated overexpression of UCA1 was significantly correlated with unexpected OS in patients with cancer (pooled HR = 1.85, 95% CI 1.62–2.10, p < 0.001). There was also a significantly negative association between high level of UCA1 and poor grade cancer (pooled OR = 2.74, 95% CI 2.04–3.70, p < 0.001) and positive lymphatic metastasis (pooled OR = 2.43, 95% CI 1.72–3.41, p < 0.001). In conclusion, our study suggested that UCA1 was correlated with more advanced clinicopathological features and poor prognosis as a novel predictive biomarker of patients with various tumors.
Highlights
Non-coding RNAs encoded by the eukaryotic genome are considered as a large number of RNAs which are not translated into proteins
Quality evaluation based on reporting recommendations for tumor marker prognostic studies (REMARK) guideline reflected quality score ranged from 40% to 80% in (Supplementary Table 3)
hazard ratio (HR) with 95% confidence interval (CI) were extracted from multivariate analysis in 14 studies, univariate analysis in 5 studies
Summary
Non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) encoded by the eukaryotic genome are considered as a large number of RNAs which are not translated into proteins. More than 90% of noncoding RNAs used to be recognized as “biological noises” in transcription progression compared with about 3% protein-coding genes until the development of high-throughput sequencing technology and large-scale mapping of transcriptomes [1, 2]. Based on structural features and biological functions, ncRNAs family has been further classified into housekeeping and regulatory ncRNAs. Regulatory ncRNAs upon nucleotide length are generally divided into two subgroups: (1) short ncRNAs shorter than 200 nucleotides such as microRNAs (miRNAs); (2) long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) longer than 200 nucleotides such as intergenic lncRNAs (lincRNAs) and circular RNAs (circRNAs) [3, 4]. Accumulating evidence have revealed the major transcriptional and post-transcriptional regulation roles of lncRNAs emerge in transcription factor recruitment, chromatin remodeling, histone modification, pre-mRNA splicing, molecular sponge and scaffold, which are involved in development of normal tissue or organ and carcinogenesis and aggression of diverse malignancies [5,6,7,8].
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