Introduction: A number of studies in gastric carcinoma have demonstrated that cancerous tissues have a significant higher HOTAIR level than that in noncancerous tissues. Overexpression of HOTAIR is associated with the development in gastric cancer.
Evidence acquisition: We collected all relevant articles and explored the association of HOTAIR expression with clinicopathological features and prognosis in patients with gastric cancer. Literature collections were conducted by searching a number of electronic databases (up to November 15, 2015). The meta-analysis was conducted by using RevMan v.5.3 software and Stata SE 12.0.
Evidence synthesis: A total of 832 patients with gastric cancer based on 10 studies were included. The Meta-analysis results showed that high-expression of HOTAIR is significantly associated with clinicopathological features in gastric cancer patients, especially in the depth of tumor invasion, lymph node metastasis, vessel invasion, lymphatic vessel involvement and TNM stage, but there is no association between HOTAIR overexpression and other clinicopathological features. In addition, aberrant HOTAIR expression is also significantly associated with the prognosis in gastric cancer patients.
Conclusions: There is an association between HOTAIR expression and clinicopathological features and prognosis in gastric cancer patients. High expression of HOTAIR in cancerous tissue could predict poor clinical outcome in gastric cancer, suggesting HOTAIR abundance may serve as a novel candidate biomarker for the clinical outcome in gastric cancers.