Clinicopathological significance and prognosis of long noncoding RNA SNHG14 expression in human cancers: A Meta-Analysis and bioinformatics analysis

Background: SNGH14 is a recently found long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) with a strong link to cancer. However, it is uncertain if the expression of SNHG14 is linked to the prognosis of individuals with various forms of cancer. We conducted a meta-analysis of the available literature to evaluate the association between SNHG14 and clinicopathological characteristics and patient prognosis Methods The databases PubMed/Medline, Web of Science, Cochrane Library, and Embase were combed for relevant papers published till November 2021. The odds ratio (OR) and 95% confidence interval (CI) were used to analyze dichotomous variables, while the hazard ratio (HR) and 95% CI were employed as a summary statistic for survival outcomes. In addition, the Cancer Genome Atlas TCGA (TCGA) and gene expression omnibus (GEO) database were utilized to investigate SNHG14 differential expression in pan-cancers. Cox regression and Kaplan-Meier analysis were used to investigate the prognostic significance of SNHG14 in pan-cancer. The association between the degree of SNHG14 expression in pan-cancer and immune infiltration, tumor mutational burden (TMB), and microsatellite instability (MSI) was measured using Spearman correlations. Results A total of 21 studies with 1,080 patients, mainly from China, were included. Our results showed that elevated SNHG14 expression was significantly associated with poor overall survival (OS) (HR = 1.39; 95% CI: 1.06-1.83; P = 0.017). In addition, increased SNHG14 expression was associated with tumor size (OR = 1.60; 95% CI: 1.20-2.14; P = 0.001), TNM staging (OR = 0.54; 95% CI: 0.40-0.71; P <0.001), lymph node metastasis (OR = 1.86; 95% CI: 1.35-2.55; P <0.001), differentiation grade (OR = 1.95; 95% CI: 1.36-2.80; P <0.001), and distant metastasis (OR = 2.44; 95% CI: 1.30 -4.58; P = 0.005). However, there was no significant difference in age (OR = 1.02; 95% CI: 0.77-1.33; P = 0.863) and gender (OR = 0.98; 95% CI: 0.72-1.35; P = 0.915). Conclusion This study revealed that overexpression of SNGH14 is associated with low OS rate and clinicopathological characteristics. SNGH14 can be considered as a new tumor marker that aids in early tumor diagnosis, thus improving the prognosis of patients.