The diagnostic and prognositic significances of HIF1A in glioma patients, a meta-analysis and bioinformatics approach

Abstract

Abstract Background Hypoxia-inducible factor 1 (HIF-1) is a transcription factor that plays a critical role in the development and progression of tumors. Recent studies have assessed the relationship between expression level of hypoxia-inducible factor 1α (HIF1A) and prognosis in gliomas patients, and some of the results indicated the gliomas patient with high expression level of HIF1A seemed to have relatively poor prognosis. However, the heterogeneity among these studies was large. So to comprehensively and quantitatively summarize the evidence on the survival of patients with gliomas, a meta-analysis and a bioinformatics analysis was performed.Results Totally, 12 papers including 912 patients were subjected to final analysis. The combined hazard ratio (HR) was 1.47 (95% CI: 1.24–1.70) in the analyses of OS, and the significant heterogeneity (I2 = 48.0%, P = 0.027) was observed. Further, subgroup analyses by ethnicity were conducted: the combined hazard ratio (HR) for Caucasian was 1.30 (95% CI: 1.03 − 1.56, I2 = 40.1%, p = 0.112), and that for Asian was 2.03 (95% CI: 1.56–2.50, I2 = 9.0%, p = 0.355). By analyzing the datasets from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), The Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) ,Chinese Glioma Genome Atlas (CGGA) and cBioPortal for Cancer Genomics, it was found that there were significantly different for HIF1A expressional levels between gliomas and the normal samples, and HIF1A expressional levels were related to overall survival rate (OS), tumor recurrence and some prognostic factors (eg. 1p/19q co-deletion, IDH mutation and MGMT methylation) of giloma patients.Conclusions Taken together, HIF1A could be a diagnostic marker and independent prognostic factor for gliomas, and comparing with Caucasian patients, Asian patients with HIF1A overexpression tended to have a more poor prognosis.