Table 3.

Comparison of studies with a statement about the prognostic value of blood hsa-miR-21-5p in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma

Characteristics	Qi et al[25]	Tomimaru et al[24]	Liu et al[32]	Wang et al[31]	Cho et al[33]	Zhang et al[18]	Current data
High miR-21 and prognosis	↔	Trend for worse prognosis	Worse prognosis	Worse prognosis	Better liver transplant-free survival	Worse prognosis	↔
Group allocation: Cut-off-value	NA	Cut-off based on ROC analyzes	50th percentile	50th percentile	50th percentile	NA	50th percentile
Origin of the cohort	Asia	Asia	Asia	Asia	Asia	Asia	Europe
Predominant etiology	HBV	HCV/HBV	HBV	HBV	HBV	NA	Mainly alcohol abuse
TNM reported	Yes	Yes		Yes	Yes	Yes
BCLC reported		Yes	Yes				Yes
Child-Pugh score reported	Yes	Yes	Yes		Yes		Yes
Sampling	Before surgery	Before surgery	Before TACE	No exact information, surgical resection	Before surgery or RFA	Pre- and postoperative serum samples	Therapy naïve and pretreated
Patients	70	126	136	97	120	46	91
Specimen	Serum	Plasma	Serum	Serum	Plasma	Serum	Serum
qPCR method	TaqMan®	TaqMan®	SYBRGreen	SYBR Green	TaqMan®	Unknown	TaqMan® SYBRGreen
Normalization	miR-16	miR-16	Quanto EC1, Quanto EC2	cel-miR-39	MiR-16	RNU6b	cel-miR-39
Publishing year	2011	2012	2014	2015	2017	2019	2020

BCLC: Barcelona Clinic Liver Cancer; HBV: Hepatitis B virus; HCC: Hepatocellular carcinoma; HCV: Hepatitis C virus; NA: Non-available; NASH: Non-alcoholic steatohepatitis; qPCR: Quantitative PCR; RFA: Radiofrequency ablation; ROC: Receiver operating characteristic; TACE: Transarterial chemoembolization; TNM: Tumor-Node-Metastasis Classification of Malignant Tumors.