Prognostic significance of VEGF-C immunohistochemical expression in colorectal cancer: A meta-analysis

• Vascular endothelial growth factor-C (VEGFC) overexpression was associated with poor prognosis for colorectal cancer patients.
• VEGF-C may be a useful biomarker that can greatly help for prognosis for colorectal cancer patients.
• When stratifying by baseline parameters of patients, our results revealed that VEGF-C expression showed positive correlation with all these factors.

BackgroundWe sought to comprehensively summarize available evidence for the use of VEGF-C protein to evaluate the clinicopathological and prognostic role of VEGF-C in colorectal cancer.MethodsElectronic databases from inception to February 2016 were used to search without language restrictions for original articles. A meta-analysis was undertaken to assess the relationship between VEGF-C expression and overall survival (OS) in colorectal cancer.ResultsTwenty-seven studies were included in the final meta-analysis. We aggregated 13 trials (n = 1.428 patients) that evaluated the correlation between OS and VEGF-C overexpression. Statistics were performed for OS (HR = 1.95; 95%CI = 1.31–2.92, P = 0.007). When the studies were stratified by the pathological variables, including T stage (n = 383 patients; OR = 1.79; 95%CI = 1.14–2.81), lymph node metastasis (n = 3212 patients; OR = 4.21; 95%CI = 3.49–5.08), M stage (n = 1106 patients; OR = 4.46; 95%CI = 2.96–6.70), vascular invasion(n = 1471 patients; OR = 2.18; 95%CI = 1.65–2.88), lymph invasion (n = 831 patients; OR = 3.95; 95%CI = 2.80–5.56), histo-differentiation (n = 1695 patients; OR = 1.34; 95%CI = 1.00–1.79) and Duke's stage(n = 778 patients; OR = 4.90; 95%CI = 3.55–6.75), TNM stage (n = 808 patients; OR = 1.73; 95%CI = 1.18–2.54) provided critical and comprehensive prognostic information.ConclusionOur results demonstrated that VEGF-C overexpression was associated with OS in colorectal cancer.