Endometriosis is a common reproductive system disease worldwide that mainly causes chronic pelvic pain and infertility. Despite its high prevalence, the diagnosis of some patients with endometriosis is delayed for several years, which may be because the gold standard for diagnosis is an expensive and invasive surgical assessment by laparoscopy or laparotomy. Circulating microRNAs (miRNAs) play an important role in a wide range of diseases, including endometriosis, and have been discovered to be potential diagnostic markers. This meta-analysis, which was designed to investigate the diagnostic value of circulating miRNAs for endometriosis, summarizes miRNA articles that met a set of inclusion criteria. Using a bivariate model, we calculated the sensitivities, specificities, and area under the curve (AUC) values of individual miRNAs and miRNA panels. The pooled diagnostic sensitivity, specificity, positive likelihood ratio (PLR), negative likelihood ratio (NLR), diagnostic odds ratio (DOR), and area under the receiver operating characteristic (AUROC) curve were 0.86 (95% CI 0.79-0.90), 0.88 (95% CI 0.80-0.93), 7.05 (95% CI 4.20-11.84), 0.16 (95% CI 11-0.24), and 0.93, respectively. Taken together, these findings indicate that circulating microRNAs may serve as potential noninvasive biomarkers of endometriosis.
Keywords: Biomarkers; Endometriosis; Meta-analysis; microRNA.