Tyrosine kinase inhibitors–induced hypothyroidism as a prognostic factor in metastatic renal cell carcinoma: a systematic review and meta-analysis
Abstract Background: Hypothyroidism as a predictive factor represent highly controversial in patients with metastatic renal cell carcinoma (mRCC) with tyrosine kinase inhibitors-induced (TKI-induced) hypothyroidism. we aimed to evaluate the predictive value of TKI-induced hypothyroidism for progression-free survival (PFS) in patients with mRCC.Methods: PubMed, Web of Science and Cochrane Library databases were searched with the keywords of "renal cell carcinoma", "hypothyroidism", "tyrosine kinase inhibitor", "sunitinib", "axitinib", "sorafenib" and "pazopanib" until September 2019. The hazard ratio (HR) and 95% confidence interval (CI) of extracted from progression-free survival (PFS) were statistically analyzed by STATA15.1 software. Heterogeneity was assessed by I²value. Publication bias was appraised by the funnel chart, Egger's and Begg's tests.Results: Eighteen studies with more than 1300 patients were included in this meta-analysis. The result demonstrated that TKI-induced hypothyroidism was an effective predictor of longer PFS (HR=0.57,95%CI:0.49-0.66, P<0.001, I²=34.4%) in patients with mRCC. No significant publication bias was detected.Conclusions: Our analysis harvested from currently available clinical evidence shows that TKI-induced hypothyroidism expressed longer PFS, compared with euthyroidism, among patients with mRCC treated with "sunitinib", "axitinib", "sorafenib" and "pazopanib".