Survival Outcome and Clinicopathologicl analysis of Homeobox gene cluster-embedded LncRNAs in Human Cancers: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis.

Objective: The ectopic expression of Homeobox (HOX) gene cluster-embedded long non-coding RNAs (LncRNAs) have been involved several carcinogenic development and progressions. This meta-analysis aimed to summarize the LncRNAs to validate the functions and the prognostic values in several kinds of cancer.

Methods: The retrospective study was conducted to analyze the association between HOX gene-related LncRNAs and the survival outcomes. Cochran's Q and I test were used for calculated heterogeneity, and I > 50%, P < 0.05 was conformed to the random effect model. Publication bias was indicated by Begg's and Egger's test.

Results: Total 15,315 patients extracting from 121 studies focused on assessing the association between LncRNAs and the survival outcomes and 12,110 participants were enrolled to address the clinicopathological features. The results demonstrated that the overexpression of HOX gene cluster-embedded LncRNAs revealed notable association among tumor size (pooled OR = 1.80), lymph node metastasis (LNM) stage (pooled OR = 3.00), tumor node metastasis (TNM) stage (pooled OR = 2.86), histological differentiation (pooled OR = 1.59) and distant metastasis (pooled OR = 2.49). Additionally, the up-regulated LncRNAs predicted a poor prognosis in overall survival (pooled HR = 1.95, 95%CI = 1.86-2.04), and also disclosed worse prognosis among the stratified analysis included HOX clusters, LncRNAs, ethnicity, and tumor classification (pooled HRs >1).

Conclusion: In summary, the findings proved that HOX gene cluster-embedded LncRNAs acted as potential biomarkers for clinical treatment of several tumors and the overexpression might be a candidate hallmark for prognosis outcome.