A systematic review and meta-analysis of long noncoding RNA linc-UBC1 expression and prognosis and clinicopathological phenotypes in human cancers.

According to previous studies, linc-UBC1 is abnormally expressed in various human tumours. Nonetheless, the clinical significance and mechanism of linc-UBC1 in cancer remains unclear. In our present analysis, we wanted to explore the specific role of linc-UBC1 in malignant tumours by integrating all of the relevant literature and subsequently elucidating the relationship between linc-UBC1 expression level and clinical characteristics of cancers. An elaborate database search of PubMed, Embase, Wanfang Data, Web of Science, Ovid, Medline, Cochrane Library and PMC was carried out up to 8 August 2019. We further applied the pooled odds ratio (OR) and hazard ratio (HR) to evaluate OS. After filtering by strict criteria, 11 studies containing 1017 cases were included in this analysis. Our results implied that high expression of linc-UBC1 was obviously related to poor OS in cancer (HR =1.735, 95% 1.348-2.235,  < .001 random effects model). Analogously, the data revealed that high expression of linc-UBC1 was highly correlated with lymph node metastasis (OR = 2.912, 95% CI: 2.056-4.125,  < .001 fix effects model) and high tumour stage (OR = 2.678, 95% CI: 1.859-3.857,  < .001 fix effects model). In summary, linc-UBC1 overexpression is associated with poor OS and advanced tumour stage and could be used as a novel prognostic biomarker in various cancers.