Meta-Analysis
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2022. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Clin Cases. Nov 26, 2022; 10(33): 12230-12239
Published online Nov 26, 2022. doi: 10.12998/wjcc.v10.i33.12230
Prognostic role of pretreatment serum ferritin concentration in lung cancer patients: A meta-analysis
Yang Gao, Jin-Tong Ge
Yang Gao, Jin-Tong Ge, Department of Cardiology Surgery, The Affiliated Huaian No. 1 People’s Hospital of Nanjing Medical University, Huaian 223001, Jiangsu Province, China
Author contributions: Ge JT made the substantial contributions to the conception and design of the work; Gao Y and Ge JT searched, selected materials and extracted data; Gao Y wrote this manuscript; Gao Y and Ge JT revised the paper carefully and also contributed to the statistical analysis; All authors have read and approved the final manuscript.
Conflict-of-interest statement: All the authors declare that there are no competing interests associated with this manuscript.
PRISMA 2009 Checklist statement: This meta-analysis was performed according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA 2009) checklist.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article that was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: https://creativecommons.org/Licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Corresponding author: Jin-Tong Ge, MD, Professor, Department of Cardiology Surgery, The Affiliated Huaian No. 1 People’s Hospital of Nanjing Medical University, No. 1 Yellow River West Road, Huaian 223001, Jiangsu Province, China. 15851861990@163.com
Received: August 23, 2022
Peer-review started: August 23, 2022
First decision: October 17, 2022
Revised: October 19, 2022
Accepted: October 24, 2022
Article in press: October 24, 2022
Published online: November 26, 2022
Core Tip

Core Tip: Our results manifested that increased pretreatment serum ferritin concentration (SFC) was significantly associated with worse overall survival (P = 0.004). Subgroup analysis based on the country (China vs non-China) showed similar results. However, subgroup analysis stratified by tumor type revealed inconsistent results (lung cancer: HR = 1.39, P = 0.008; small cell lung cancer: HR = 1.99, P = 0.175; non-small cell lung cancer: HR = 1.03, P = 0.281). Pretreatment SFC might serve as a promising prognostic indicator in lung cancer patients and elevated pretreatment SFC predicts worse prognosis. However, more high-quality studies with big sample sizes are still needed to further verify its prognostic value in lung cancer.