The diagnostic accuracy of circular RNAs in colorectal cancer: a meta-analysis

Circular RNAs (circRNAs) have been widely expressed in multiple types of cancer. Nevertheless, there have been limited systematic studies about the diagnostic accuracy of circRNAs in colorectal cancer (CRC). Hence, we attempted to explore the mechanism of circRNAs as diagnostic biomarkers in CRC. Investigation of the PubMed database and other search engines were carried out to identify related literature from 2015 to December 2018. The program of Quality Assessment of Diagnostic Accuracies Studies 2 (QUADAS-2) was used for assessing the study quality. The STATA version 14 (Stata Corporation, College Station, TX, USA) and RevMan5.3 (Cochrane Collaboration, Copenhagen, Denmark) were applied to meta-analysis. There were six studies included in the meta-analysis. The pooled sensitivity and specificity with 95% confidential intervals (95% CIs) were 0.85 (0.78-0.89) and 0.72 (0.65-0.78), respectively. The positive likelihood ratios (PLR) and negative likelihood ratios (NLR) with 95% confidential intervals (95% CIs) were 2.99 (2.43-3.68) and 0.21 (0.16-0.29), respectively. The diagnostic odds ratio (DOR) with 95% confidential interval (95% CI) was 13.95 (9.75-19.97). The overall area under the curve (AUC) value was 0.84, indicating the circRNAs might be diagnostic indicators in colorectal cancer.