Increased expression of MMP14 correlates with the poor prognosis of Chinese patients with gastric cancer

The role of matrix metalloproteinase 14 (MMP14) has been identified to involve tumor progression and prognosis. The purpose of this study is to investigate the role of MMP14 in tumor progression and prognosis of gastric cancer. This study indicated that MMP14 mRNA and protein were overexpressed in gastric cancer tissue (P < 0.001 and P = 0.037, respectively) and significantly associated with clinical stage (P = 0.005), lymph node metastasis (P = 0.003), and distant metastasis (P = 0.017). Moreover, we found that the overexpression of MMP14 was a significant predictor of poor prognosis for gastric cancer patients (P < 0.001). Furthermore, we performed a meta-analysis which included 594 cases from 3 studies and showed that MMP14 overexpression was a significantly poor prognostic factor in Chinese patients with gastric cancer and HR (95% Cl) was 2.17 (1.64-2.86). In conclusion, MMP14 plays an important role on gastric cancer progression and prognosis and acts as a convictive biomarker for prognostic prediction for Chinese patients with gastric cancer. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.