Prognostic Significance of Androgen Receptor Expression in Triple Negative Breast Cancer: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Abstract

The androgen receptor (AR) is increasingly considered as a potential biomarker for breast cancer. Nevertheless, the prognostic value of AR expression in patients with triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) remains controversial. Therefore, in this meta-analysis, we investigated AR expression and its impact on survival outcome. PubMed, Embase, the Cochrane Library, and references of articles were searched to identify relevant studies that investigated the association between AR expression and prognosis in patients diagnosed with TNBC and were published between 1946 and May 2019. The hazard ratio (HR) and confidence interval (CI) of disease-free survival, overall survival, distant disease-free survival, and recurrence-free survival were weighted and pooled by using the fixed-effect or random-effect model based on the heterogeneity of included studies. A total of 27 studies including 4914 patients with TNBC were included. AR was expressed in 27.96% (1315/4703) of patients with TNBC. In addition, AR expression in TNBC was not associated with disease-free survival (HR, 0.923; 95% CI, 0.671-1.271; P = .634), overall survival (HR, 0.910; 95% CI, 0.678-1.222; P = .531), distant disease-free survival (HR, 1.02; 95% CI, 0.96-1.08; P = .489), or recurrence-free survival (HR, 0.957; 95% CI, 0.462-1.982; P = .906) in TNBC, regardless of confounding factors and heterogeneity that existed among included studies. In patients with TNBC, AR expression is not associated with prognosis.