Serum Zta antibody of Epstein-Barr virus exerts potential function in the diagnosis of nasopharyngeal cancer.

The diagnosis of nasopharyngeal cancer (NPC) remains a clinical challenge. Many studies have assessed the diagnostic potential of Zta antibody of the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) in NPC patients but with controversial results. This study aims to summarize the overall diagnostic performance of EBV Zta antibody in NPC. Based on a comprehensive search of the Pubmed and Embase, Web of Science, Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), Wanfang Databases and China Citation Databases, we identified outcome data from all articles estimating diagnostic accuracy of EBV Zta antibody for NPC. A summary estimation for sensitivity, specificity, and other diagnostic indexes were pooled using a bivariate model. The overall measure of accuracy was calculated using summary receiver operating characteristic curve and the area under curve (AUC) was calculated. According to our inclusion criteria, 17 studies with 11,822 subjects (1,645 NPC cases, 10,177 controls) were included. The summary estimates were: sensitivity 0.87 (95 % confidence interval [CI] = 0.86-0.89), specificity 0.94 (95 % CI = 0.93-0.94), positive likelihood ratio 8.05 (95 % CI = 5.59-11.59), negative likelihood ratio 0.16 (95 % CI = 0.12-0.21), diagnostic odds ratio 52.93 (95 % CI = 29.95-93.56), the AUC and Q* index were 0.9352 and 0.8714, respectively. In conclusion, serum EBV Zta had a better diagnostic performance for NPC. Further studies should be performed to confirm our findings.