Prognostic value of FOXA1 in breast cancer: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

Background: Despite some published papers analyzing the prognostic role of forkhead-box A1 (FOXA1) in breast cancer, it has not yet been considered as an established prognostic factor in clinical practice. The present meta-analysis evaluated the prognostic value of FOXA1 in breast cancer.

Methods: PubMed, Web of Science and Embase databases were searched for relevant published literature that evaluated the correlation between FOXA1 and breast cancer. Either a fixed or random effect model was applied to estimate the pooled hazard ratio (HR) for FOXA1 prognosis in breast cancer.

Results: A total of nine articles comprising 6386 breast cancer patients met the inclusion criteria. Among these nine studies, five studies and four studies investigated the prognostic association with disease-free survival (DFS), and overall survival (OS), respectively. Meta-analysis results suggested that high FOXA1 expression was positively associated with DFS (pooled HR: 0.43, 95% CI: 0.23-0.81; P < 0.05) and OS (pooled HR: 0.39, 95% CI: 0.26-0.60; P < 0.05) in breast cancer patients. No publication bias was discovered by Begg's test in this meta-analysis.

Conclusions: The results from this meta-analysis indicated that elevated FOXA1 expression level was associated with better outcome in breast cancer.