Clinicopathological Significance of DLC-1 Expression in Cancer: a Meta-Analysis

Background: Recent reports have shown that DLC-1 is widely expressed in normal tissues and is downregulatedin a wide range of human tumors, suggesting it may act as a tumor suppressor gene. We conducted ameta-analysis to determine the correlation between DLC-1 expression and clinicopathological characteristics incancers. Materials and
Methods: A detailed literature search was made for relevant publications from PubMed,EMBASE, Cochrane library databases, Web of Science, CNKI. The methodological quality of the studies wasalso evaluated. Analyses of pooled data were performed and odds ratios (ORs) were calculated and summarized.
Results: Final analysis was performed of 1,815 cancer patients from 19 eligible studies. We observed that DLC-1 expression was significantly lower in cancers than in normal tissues. DLC-1 expression was not found to beassociated with tumor differentiation status. However, DLC-1 expression was obviously lower in advance stagethan in early-stage cancers and was more down-regulated in metastatic than non-metastatic cancers.
Conclusions:The results of our meta-analysis suggested that DLC-1 expression is significantly lower in cancers than in normaltissues. Aberrant DLC-1 expression may play an important role in cancer genesis and metastasis.