The Diagnostic Value of Circulating VEGF in Diabetic Retinopathy in Asia: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

ABSTRACT

Purpose

Vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) has obvious clinical value in diabetes, but the conclusions on the diagnostic value of diabetic retinopathy (DR) are not consistent. This study aims to comprehensively evaluate the accuracy of circulating VEGF in the diagnosis of DR in the Asian population by a method of meta-analysis.

Methods

PubMed, Cochrane Library, Embase, Web of Science, China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), and China Wanfang Databases were searched for relevant studies on the diagnostic value of VEGF for DR in Asia up to November 2021. The pooled sensitivity, specificity, positive likelihood ratio (PLR), negative likelihood ratio (NLR), diagnostic odds ratio (DOR), and areas under the curve (AUC) were calculated by Stata 15.0 software.

Results

After screening, eight eligible studies were enrolled, including 547 patients with DR. The results of the meta-analysis showed that the pooled DOR, sensitivity, specificity, PLR, and NLR were 31.67 (95%CI: 13.55 ~ 74.05), 0.86 (95%CI: 0.74 ~ 0.93), 0.84 (95%CI: 0.80 ~ 0.87), 5.33 (95%CI: 4.09 ~ 6.93), 0.17 (95%CI: 0.09 ~ 0.32), respectively. The AUC was 0.86 (95%CI: 0.82 ~ 0.89).

Conclusion

Circulating VEGF has a good diagnostic value in DR in the Asian population, with the potential to be an early diagnostic marker for DR.

KEYWORDS:

• VEGF
• diabetic retinopathy
• diagnostic value
• meta-analysis

Abbreviations

VEGF: Vascular endothelial growth factor; DR: diabetic retinopathy; CNKI: China National Knowledge Infrastructure; PLR: positive likelihood ratio; NLR: negative likelihood ratio; DOR: diagnostic odds ratio; AUC: areas under the curve; DM: diabetes mellitus; NPDR: non-proliferative diabetic retinopathy; PRISMA: Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses; QUADAS-2: quality assessment of diagnostic accuracy studies-2; TP: true positive; FP: false positive; FN: false negative; TN: true negative; SROC:summary receiver operating characteristic.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Authors’ contributions

Xiaobing Liu, Xiaoping Zhou, Ran Meng: Critical revision of the manuscript; Xiaobing Liu, Xiaoping Zhou, Weiqiong Song: Substantial contribution to the conception and design of the work, manuscript drafting; Xiaobing Liu, Weiqiong Song, Jiechun Zeng, Xiuxiu Niu: Acquisition, analysis, and interpretation of the data; Xiaobing Liu, Xiaoping Zhou, Weiqiong Song, Jiechun Zeng, Xiuxiu Niu, Ran Meng: Revising the manuscript critically, final approval of the version to be published.All authors have read and approved the final manuscript.

Ethics approval and consent to participate

Ethical approval was not needed because this is a meta-analysis.

Data availability statement

The datasets used and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/09286586.2022.2088805

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.