Abstract
BackgroundPrevious studies have shown that human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) may play an important role in the invasion and metastasis of pancreatic cancer, but the relationship between HER2 amplification level and prognosis of pancreatic cancer patients is still controversial. Therefore, we performed a meta-analysis to determine the prognostic significance of HER2 amplification based on fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) in patients with pancreatic cancer.MethodsPubMed, EMBASE, and Web of Science (Jan 2001 to Jun 2015) were searched. Only articles that detect the HER2 amplification by FISH method were included. RevMan 5.3 and STATA version 12 were used to perform this meta-analysis. Pooled calculations were carried out on hazard ratio (HR) and 95 % confidence interval (CI) to assess the risk of disease.ResultsA total of six eligible studies were enrolled in meta-analysis. The univariate analysis results showed that HER2 amplification was not significantly associated with patients’ overall survival (pooled HR, 1.87, 95 % CI, 0.64–5.46, P = 0.25), which are maintained in one study of multivariate analysis (HR 0.51, 95 % CI, 0.12–2.14, P = 0.358). HER2 amplification also had no correlation with clinicopathological factors such as age, gender, lymph node metastasis, and tumor stage.ConclusionsOur results showed that HER2 amplification based on FISH may not be a good prognostic factor for survival in patients with pancreatic cancer.
Highlights
Previous studies have shown that human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) may play an important role in the invasion and metastasis of pancreatic cancer, but the relationship between HER2 amplification level and prognosis of pancreatic cancer patients is still controversial
We identified six studies from five countries, which used fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) method to detect the HER2 status and provided outcome data stratified by HER2 status
In contrast to previous reports, our results showed that HER2 amplification was not related to poor prognosis of pancreatic cancer
Summary
Previous studies have shown that human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) may play an important role in the invasion and metastasis of pancreatic cancer, but the relationship between HER2 amplification level and prognosis of pancreatic cancer patients is still controversial. The most widely studied prognostic factors are related to pathological characteristics of the pancreatic cancer, including differentiation, tumor stage, and metastasis [3]. Studies showed that HER2 is expressed in many tissues including breast, gastric, lung, and ovarian cancer and may promote cell proliferation and facilitate uncontrolled cell growth [5,6,7]. HER2 expression is observed in up to 30 % of breast cancer with this receptor being recognized as a poor prognostic marker and a therapeutic target
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