Relationships Between Pten And Clinicopathological Features Of Hepatocellular Carcinoma: A Meta-Analysis

We performed a meta-analysis to demonstrate the relationship between PTEN expression in immunochemical staining and clinicopathological features of hepatocellular cancer (HCC). There were 11 eligible researches encompassing 872 HCC patients from the databases we used, including PubMed, Embase, and Web of Science. We are using the odds ratios (ORs) with 95% confidence intervals (95% CIs) to evaluate for absence of heterogeneity in a fixed effects model. Significant associations between positive PTEN expression and high tumor grades (OR = 2.56, 95% CI: 1.89-3.47, P < 0.00001), early tumor stage (OR = 3.26, 95% CI: 1.48-7.22, P < 0.00001), less cirrhosis (OR = 0.61, 95% CI: 0.42-0.89, P = 0.01) were found. However, according to the results, we found no significant associations between PTEN expression and gender, tumor size and capsule invasion of HCC patients.