Diagnostic accuracy of anti-RA33 antibody for rheumatoid arthritis: systematic review and meta-analysis

Objective. The main purpose of this meta-analysis is to evaluate the diagnostic value of anti-RA33 antibody for rheumatoid arthritis. Methods. In order to obtain eligible studies, a systematic literature search was performed on PubMed, Web of science, EBSCO, CNKI and CBM from January 2000 to September 2015. Quality Assessment of Diagnostic Accuracy Studies (QUADAS) was employed to assess the quality of the relevant studies. Meta-disc 1.4 and Stata 11.0 were adopted in this meta-analysis. Results. After rigorous review, fifty studies were included in this study, which are all reliable to summarise the diagnostic value in this meta-analysis. The result of the analysis shows the pooled sensitivity is 0.33 (95% confidence interval (CI): 0.31-0.34) and the specificity is 0.90 (95% CI: 0.89-0.90), for the diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis. Besides, the area under the summary ROC curve (AUC) is 0.6863. Conclusion. The current evidence suggests that anti-RA33 antibody has high diagnostic specificity value for rheumatoid arthritis, which may be useful for the disease diagnostic application. To verify this conclusion, more prospective research on the diagnostic value of anti-RA33 antibody for rheumatoid arthritis are needed in the future.