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Abstract
Objective: To explore the predictive role of pretreatment albumin to globulin ratio (AGR) for prognosis in lung cancer.
Methods: A comprehensive literature retrieval was performed in the PubMed, Cochrane Library, Web of Science and EMBASE databases up to May 20, 2019. The pooled hazard ratio (HR) and 95% confidence interval (CI) were applied to assess the correlation of pretreatment AGR with overall survival (OS) and disease-free survival (DFS). Sensitivity analysis was performed to assess the stability of results. Bess’s funnel plot and Egger’s test were conducted to detect potential publication bias.
Results: Eight articles involving 3496 patients were included in our meta-analysis and all studies were from Asian countries. The results demonstrated that a low pretreatment AGR was significantly associated with poor OS (HR = 1.88, 95% CI: 1.49–2.38, P<0.001) and DFS (HR = 2.09, 95% CI: 1.56–2.81, P<0.001) and sensitivity analysis indicated the stability of above results. Publication bias test showed that there were two potentially unpublished articles, but they did not have a significant influence on the results of our meta-analysis.
Conclusion: Our study manifested that pretreatment AGR was a reliable predictor for survival and it may contribute to the risk evaluation and therapy strategy formulation of lung cancer patients.
Disclosure Statement
The authors declare that there are no competing interests associated with this manuscript.
Ethical Approval
All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. For this type of study, formal consent is not required.
Author Contributions
Guowei Che conceived and designed the analyses. Yan Wang and Jue Li performed the literature search and selection, collected data and wrote the paper. Yanming Wu and Jialong Li performed statistical analyses. All authors contributed substantially to its revision.