Aims: Osteopontin (OPN) plays an important role in many physiological and pathological processes (wound healing, inflammation, immune response, and tumorigenesis). This meta-analysis assessed the diagnostic value of osteopontin in ovarian cancer.
Methods and results: Searches in Embase and PubMed were conducted, in order to identify eligible studies on osteopontin expression and its diagnostic value in ovarian cancer. The revised Quality Assessment for Studies of Diagnostic Accuracy (QUADAS-2) tool was applied to examine the quality of these studies and the overall osteopontin diagnostic accuracy in ovarian cancer was pooled using the bivariate model. The publication bias was assessed using funnel plots and Deek's test. This search methodology resulted in 13 studies with a total of 839 ovarian cancer patients and 1439 controls in this meta-analysis. The overall osteopontin diagnostic sensitivity and specificity of ovarian cancer were 0.66 (95% CI, 0.51-0.78) and 0.88 (95% CI, 0.78-0.93), respectively. The area under summary receiver operating characteristic (sROC) curves (AUC) was 0.85 (95%CI, 0.81-0.88). There was no significant publication bias observed across the eligible studies. However, a major design deficiency of the eligible studies is the issue of subject selection bias.
Conclusions: Osteopontin could be a useful biomarker in diagnosis of ovarian cancer. Due to the design deficits of the eligible studies, a future study with a larger sample size and better design is needed to rigorously confirm the diagnostic potential of osteopontin in ovarian cancer.