Salivary Biomarkers in Oral Potentially Malignant Disorders: A Quality Appraisal of Systematic Review and Meta-analysis
Shruti Gupta, Deepti Sharma, Anita Hooda, Mala Kamboj, George Koshy, Vishal Kumar SharmaAim:
In recent years, biomarkers in saliva have been of great interest as promising non-invasive tools for the diagnosis and prognostic evaluation of oral potentially malignant disorders (OPMDs). The existing literature includes a substantial number of systematic reviews and meta-analyses investigating the role of salivary biomarkers in OPMDs; however, the reliability and usefulness of their findings depend to a large extent on the methodological quality of the reviews. The purpose of this article is therefore to assess the existing evidence on the potential usefulness of salivary biomarkers in OPMDs and to evaluate the methodological rigor and quality of available systematic reviews and meta-analyses, as well as the limitations and gaps in knowledge.
Methods:
The literature was searched for systematic reviews and meta-analyses that assessed the potential of salivary biomarkers in OPMDs in PubMed, Google Scholar, Scopus, and ScienceDirect. AMSTAR-2 was used to assess the quality of the systematic reviews and meta-analyses included.
Results:
Eighteen articles meeting the predefined eligibility criteria were included, of which 11 carried out meta-analyses, while the remaining 7 were only systematic reviews. The corrected covered area (CCA) of 7.39% indicated moderate overlap between studies. The main markers studied were lactate dehydrogenase (LDH), microRNAs (miRNAs), interleukin-6 (IL-6), and tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α). All included systematic reviews and meta-analyses were found to have critically low confidence in quality.
Conclusion:
Strong adherence to established quality assessment standards is recommended to improve the reliability and validity of the evidence for all forthcoming systematic review compilations.