Abstract
Human Homeobox A transcript at the distal tip (HOTTIP) is a putative oncogene in solid tumors. We performed a meta-analysis to investigate the association between HOTTIP expression and clinical outcomes in cancer patients. Eligible studies were collected from a literature search of the online electronic databases of Embase, Web of Science, PubMed and the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (up to January 2, 2017). Fixed-effects models were used to compute pooled odds ratios (ORs) and hazard ratios (HRs). In total, we analyzed nine studies that included 800 patients with seven tumor types. Overall survival was lower for patients with high HOTTIP expression than for those with low expression (HR = 2.30, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.81-2.91, P < 0.001). High HOTTIP expression was also associated with lymph node metastasis (OR = 2.40, 95% CI: 1.70-3.37, P < 0.001), distant metastasis (OR = 3.30, 95% CI: 1.78-6.12, P < 0.001), poor tumor differentiation (OR = 1.55, 95% CI: 1.03-2.32, P = 0.036) and a poor clinical stage (OR = 3.28, 95% CI: 2.22-4.83, P < 0.001). This meta-analysis demonstrated that high HOTTIP expression in cancer patients is associated with poor clinical outcomes. Thus, HOTTIP is a potential predictive biomarker of cancer.