Vimentin overexpression correlates with clinicopathologic features and poor prognosis of esophagus cancer patients: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Background: Recently, the association between vimentin expression and esophageal carcinoma (EC) was investigated in several studies. However, the results remain unclear. This study aimed to analyze the associations of vimentin expression with clinicopathological parameters and prognosis of EC. Methods: : Eligible studies were searched from the PubMed, Web of science, Embase, Medline, and CNKI databases. The associations of vimentin expression with risk, overall survival and clinical features were evaluated by I 2 statistics and P values. The hazards ratio (HR), odds ratio (OR) with its 95% confidence interval (CI) were used to assess associations of vimentin expression with clinicopathological features and survival time of EC. The meta-analysis was performed using Stata 14.0 software. Results: : In total, 12 eligible studies were included for the meta-analysis. In patients with EC, vimentin overexpression was significantly associated with increased risk (OR=15.97, 95%CI=5.28-48.26, P < 0.05) and poorer prognosis (HR=1.79, 95%CI=1.44-2.15, P < 0.05). Moreover, vimentin overexpression was related to the increased invasion of blood vessels (OR=3.25, 95%CI=1.72-6.13, P < 0.05), advanced tumor stage (OR=2.28, 95%CI=1.26-4.13, P < 0.05), and lower differentiation (OR=0.65, 95%CI=0.45-0.94, P < 0.05) of EC. Conclusion: The present study demonstrated that vimentin overexpression might be an effiective biomarker for predicting the clinical progression and prognosis of EC patients.