Table 1.
Main characteristics and results of the eligible studies.
Figure 1.
Literature search strategy and selection of articles.
A total of 346 articles were selected for the meta-analysis by browsing the databases PubMed, Embase and Wanfang, of which 324 were excluded after reviewing the title and abstract, seven articles were excluded after reviewing the full publications, the reasons for exclusion were: (a) Non-association studies (b) researchers in the article did not use neither histopathologic analysis nor close clinical and imaging follow-up for at least 6 months, (c) association studies for other diseases (d), non-original articles, (e) data couldn’t be extracted or (f) repeated data from the same or similar population. Finally, a total of 15 studies with 1633 patients, who fulfilled all of the inclusion criteria, were considered for the analysis.
Figure 2.
Forest plot depiction of p16INK4a expression and OR for clinical pathologic features.
Clinicopathological parameters investigated are lymph node status (A), TMN classification (B), tumor grade (C), size of tumor (D), vascular invasion (E). OR with corresponding confidence intervals are shown.
Figure 3.
Analysis of p16INK4a expression and survival of cervical cancer patients.
Forest plot of RR for OS (A) and DFS (B) among included studies. Combined RR was calculated by a random mode.
Table 2.
Egger’s test of funnel plot asymmetry.