Increased expression of P-cadherin is an indicator of poor prognosis in breast cancer: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Purpose P-cadherin (CDH3), located at 16q22.1 belonging to classical cadherin family, is a calcium-dependent glycoprotein associated with cell to cell adhesion, migration, and invasion in cancer. This meta-analysis was conducted to examine the prognostic utility of P-cadherin expression in breast cancer (BC). Methods A comprehensive literature search was carried out using the available databases to obtain relevant research articles to test the relationship between P-cadherin and BC. Correlation of P-cadherin expression and disease-free survival (DFS) or overall survival (OS) was tested using hazard ratio (HR), relative risk (RR) at 95% confidence interval (CI) by univariate and/or multivariate analysis. A total of 11 studies from 7 countries were found to be relevant and were further subjected to statistical analysis to find an association between the P-cadherin expression with BC. Additionally, we have also performed a co-relation analysis of P-cadherin expression with GOBO and Cancertool in breast cancer using publicly available breast cancer datasets. Results Our study shows that P-cadherin expression is significantly linked with poor prognosis in the various subtypes of BC. The HR for OS and DFS was 1.87 (95% CI = 1.48-2.36) and 1.64 (95% CI = 1.18-2.27) respectively. Conclusions In this meta-analysis, we identified a positive correlation between the overexpression of P-cadherin and BC. Our study demonstrates that P-cadherin overexpression can be used as a prognostic indicator in BC.