The association between statin use and survival of esophageal cancer patients A systematic review and meta-analysis

Abstract

Whether statin use has any impact on survival of esophageal cancer patients remains controversial. Therefore, we conducted a metaanalysis focusing on current topic for the first time. We systematically searched the following databases for relevant studies comparing survival between statin users and non-users among esophageal cancer patients up to March 16, 2019: Pubmed, Embase, and Web of Science. We extracted data of hazard ratio (HR) with 95%confidence interval (CI) of all-cause and cancer-specific mortality for analysis. We used the STATA 12.0 software to perform this meta-analysis. We finally included a total of 4 cohort studies involving a total of 20,435 esophageal cancer patients (5319 statin users and 15116 non-users). Our meta-analysis found that statin use after diagnosis of esophageal cancer was significantly correlated to decreased all-cause (random effects: HR=0.81, 95%CI: 0.75-0.89, P