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Research Paper|Volume 11, Issue 24|pp 12568—12580

Prognostic role of programmed death-ligand 1 expression in patients with biliary tract cancer: a meta-analysis

Changjiang Lei1, Xiulan Peng2, Xiaojun Gong1, Ying Fan3, Shenglin Wu4, Ning Liu1, Lei Li1, Jianbin Huang1, Gang Zheng1, Zhixiong Long2
  • 1Department of General Surgery, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Jianghan University, Wuhan, China
  • 2Department of Oncology, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Jianghan University, Wuhan, Hubei 430000, China
  • 3Department of Cardiology, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Jianghan University, Wuhan, Wuhan, Hubei 430000, China
  • 4Department of Pharmacology, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Jianghan University, Wuhan, Wuhan, Hubei 430000, China
* Equal contribution and Co-first authors
Received: September 11, 2019Accepted: November 26, 2019Published: December 27, 2019
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.102588

Copyright © 2019 Lei et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Previous studies investigated the prognostic role of programmed death-ligand 1 (PD-L1) expression in patients with biliary tract cancer (BTC); however, the results remained controversial. Therefore, we conducted the current meta-analysis with the aim of clarifying the association between PD-L1 expression and prognosis as well as with several important clinicopathological features of BTC. We searched PubMed, Embase, and Web of Science for relevant studies. Studies that detected PD-L1 expression in tumor cells by using immunohistochemistry (IHC) were selected. Pooled hazard ratios (HRs) and pooled odds ratios (ORs) with 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were calculated to estimate the correlations. In total, 15 independent studies with 1,776 patients were included in this meta-analysis. The pooled data demonstrated that high PD-L1 expression was associated with poor overall survival (n=15, HR=1.79, 95% CI=1.55–2.07, p<0.001). The correlation between PD-L1 expression and disease-free survival was not significant (n=6, HR=1.38, 95% CI=1.00–1.91, p=0.051). In addition, no significant correlation was observed between PD-L1 expression and clinical features in patients with BTC. Our study results showed that PD-L1 expression could play a pivotal role as an effective factor of poor prognosis in patients with BTC.