Clinicopathological and prognostic significance of metastasis-associated in colon cancer-1 in gastric cancer: A meta-analysis

Background: The gene metastasis-associated in colon cancer-1 (MACC1) has been reported to be overexpressed in diverse human malignancies, and an increasing amount of evidence suggests that its overexpression is associated with the development and progression of many human tumors. However, the prognostic and clinicopathological value of MACC1 in gastric cancer remains inconclusive. Therefore, we conducted this meta-analysis to investigate the effect of positive MACC1 expression on clinicopathological features and survival outcomes in gastric cancer. Methods: Medline, Web of Science, and EMBASE databases were searched for relevant articles published up to 10 April 2018. The correlation of MACC1 expression levels with overall survival and clinicopathological features was analyzed. Results: In this meta-analysis, nine studies with a total of 2103 gastric cancer patients were included. Our results showed that high expression of MACC1 was significantly related to a poor overall survival. Moreover, our meta-analysis showed that MACC1 overexpression was significantly linked to distant metastasis and vascular invasion. There were no significant correlations between positive MACC1 expression and gender, localization, tumor-node-metastasis (TNM) stage, tumor extent (T stage) and lymph node involvement (N stage) Conclusions: MACC1 expression levels can serve as a novel prognostic factor in gastric cancer patients.