The research progress on the association between dietary habits and esophageal cancer: a narrative review.

OBJECTIVE: This article summarizes the research progress on the association of dietary habits with esophageal cancer (EC), with the aim of gaining a better understanding of lifestyle, dietary, and drug-related risk factors as well as protective factors of EC. BACKGROUND: EC is one of the most common malignant cancers and has a high mortality rate. Evidence has suggested that dietary habits are closely related to EC. Several researches refer to the issue of the relationship between dietary habits and EC, but rare of them summary systematically and comprehensively. It is of great importance to study the role of dietary habits in the etiology of EC for the prevention and treatment of this disease. METHODS: We searched the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), PubMed, Medline and EMBASE databases to identify studies on the association of dietary habits with EC published between the databases' dates of inception and March 2021. CONCLUSIONS: This comprehensive review summarizes the state-of-the-art research findings on the association between dietary habits and EC, with the literature we obtained revealing that dietary habits have been increasingly regarded as potential etiologies or protective factors of EC, which reinforce the importance of suitable planning of interventions to reduce the burden of this disease among the population.

Clinicopathological and prognostic significance of Oct-4 expression in patients with non-small cell lung cancer: a systematic review and meta-analysis.

BACKGROUND: Octamer-binding transcription factor 4 (Oct-4) has been identified to participate in the tumorigenicity and malignancy of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). However, its definite prognostic roles in NSCLC still remain a debate. Therefore, we conducted this meta-analysis to evaluate the prognostic value of Oct-4 expression in NSCLC and its relationship to some major clinicopathological characteristics. METHODS: A comprehensive literature retrieval was performed in PubMed, EMBASE and the Web of Science to identify the full-text articles that met our eligibility criteria. Odds ratio (OR) with 95% confidence interval (CI) severed as the summarized statistics for clinicopathological assessments, and hazard ratio (HR) with 95% CI served as the summarized statistics for prognostic assessments. Q-test and I(2)-statistic were used to evaluate the level of heterogeneity. Potential publication bias was detected by both Begg's test and Egger's test. RESULTS: There were 16 retried articles with 1,363 NSCLC cases included into this meta-analysis. Oct-4 expression was found to be significantly associated with the unfavorable outcomes for differentiation degree (OR: 3.065; 95% CI: 1.568-5.957; P=0.001), TNM stage (OR: 3.695; 95% CI: 2.252-6.063; P<0.001) and lymphatic metastasis (OR: 2.372; 95% CI: 1.504-3.742; P<0.001), but not associated with the histological subtypes, gender, age and smoking status. Oct-4 expression was also significantly associated with the poor prognosis of NSCLC (HR: 3.030; 95% CI: 2.283-4.021; P<0.001). The prognostic roles of Oct-4 expression in NSCLC still remained statistically reliable in the subgroups stratified by statistical analysis, patients' origins, positively-stained sites and histological subtypes. CONCLUSIONS: Our meta-analysis indicates that Oct-4 can serve as a strong biomarker predicting the poor clinicopathological and prognostic characteristics of NSCLC. More high-quality studies based on a large sample size will be very helpful to further validate and modify our findings in the future.