Objectives: The diagnosis of lung cancer remains a clinical challenge. Many studies have assessed the diagnostic potential of anti-p53 antibody in lung cancer patients but with controversial results. This study aims to summarize the overall diagnostic performance of anti-p53 antibody in lung cancer.
Materials and methods: Based on a comprehensive search of the Pubmed and Embase, we identified outcome data from all articles estimating diagnostic accuracy of anti-p53 antibody for lung cancer. A summary estimation for sensitivity, specificity, and other diagnostic indexes were pooled using a bivariate model. The overall measure of accuracy was calculated using summary receiver operating characteristic curve and the area under curve (AUC) was calculated.
Results: According to our inclusion criteria, 16 studies with 4414 subjects (2249 lung cancers, 2165 controls) were included. The summary estimates were: sensitivity 0.20 (95% CI 0.15-0.27), specificity 0.97 (95% CI 0.95-0.98), positive likelihood ratio 6.64 (95% CI 4.34-10.17), negative likelihood ratio 0.83 (95% CI 0.77-0.89), diagnostic odds ratio 8.04 (95% CI 5.05-12.79), the AUC was 0.84. Subgroup analysis suggested that anti-p53 antibody had a better diagnostic performance for small cell lung cancer than non-small cell lung cancer.
Conclusions: anti-p53 antibody can be an assistant marker in diagnosing lung cancer, but the low sensitivity limits its use as a screening tool for lung cancer. Further studies should be performed to confirm our findings.