Prognostic and clinical significance of long non-coding RNA SNHG12 expression in various cancers

Recently, increasing studies suggested that lncRNA SNHG12 was aberrantly expressed in kinds of cancers. However, definite prognostic value of SNHG12 remains unclear. We conducted this meta-analysis to evaluate the association between SNHG12 expression level and cancer prognosis. A literature retrieval was conducted by searching kinds of databases. The meta-analysis was performed by using Revman 5.2 and Stata 12.0 software. Besides, The Cancer Genome Atlas dataset was analyzed to validate the results in our meta-analysis via using Gene Expression Profiling Interactive Analysis. The pooled results showed that high SNHG12 expression significantly indicated worse overall survival and recurrence-free survival. Tumor type, sample size, survival analysis method, and cutoff value did not alter SNHG12 prognosis value according to stratified analysis results. Additionally, higher expression of SNHG12 suggested unfavorable clinicopathological outcomes including larger tumor size, lymph node metastasis, distant metastasis, and advanced clinical stage. Online cross-validation in TCGA dataset further indicated that cancer patients with upregulated SNHG12 expression had worse overall survival and disease-free survival. Therefore, elevated SNHG12 expression was associated with poor survival and unfavorable clinical outcomes in various cancers, and therefore might be a potential prognostic biomarker in human cancers.