Abstract
Background/aims: Ischemia-modified albumin (IMA) has been widely accepted as a serological biomarker. IMA has been proposed as a simple and novel marker of oxidative stress in preeclampsia (PE). This systematic review and diagnostic test accuracy meta-analysis aims to evaluate the diagnostic accuracy of this novel serological biomarker, IMA to detect PE.
Methods: A systematic search of major databases was performed to identify all published diagnostic accuracy studies on IMA. Risk of bias and applicability concerns were assessed for included studies. Summary estimates; the pooled sensitivity, specificity, and the diagnostic odds ratio (DOR) of IMA for the diagnosis of PE were computed using random-effects models. The overall test performance was summarized using summary receiver operating characteristic (SROC) curve analysis.
Results: Six articles were included in this meta-analysis. The overall estimates of IMA in detecting PE were pooled sensitivity; 0.80 (95%CI 0.73–0.86), pooled specificity; 0.76 (95%CI 0.70–0.81), DOR; 14.32 (95%CI 5.06–40.57), and area under curve (AUC); 0.860. There was no between-study heterogeneity due to threshold effect.
Conclusions: This meta-analysis showed IMA could be useful as a biomarker for PE with good accuracy (AUC = 0.860). However, further research is needed for re-evaluation and clinical validation of fairly promising results of this meta-analysis.
Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge the timely response by the corresponding authors of Gafsou et al. [Citation16], and Osmanagaoglu et al. [Citation17] to our e-mail communications for important information related to their respective studies. Dr V. S. Reddy is very much thankful to Prof Tiejun Tong, and Luo Dehui (PhD Scholar), Department of Mathematics, Hong Kong Baptist University for their statistical expertise and help in the methodology.
Disclosure statement
All the authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.