Impact of early diagnosis of carotid artery stenosis by carotid ultrasound: A protocol of systematic review and meta-analysis.

BACKGROUND: The purpose of this study is to explore the impact of carotid ultrasound (CU) for early diagnosis of carotid artery stenosis (CAS). METHODS: Literatures will be sought from the following electronic databases: MEDLINE, EMBASE, Cochrane Library, PSYCINFO, Web of Science, Allied and Complementary Medicine Database, and China National Knowledge Infrastructure. The search will cover from the start of indexing to the present without any limitations of language and publication status. All study quality will be assessed by Quality Assessment of Diagnostic Accuracy Studies tool, and data will be analyzed by RevMan V.5.3 software and Stata V.12.0 software. RESULTS: This study will investigate the impact of CU for early diagnosis of CAS through sensitivity, specificity, positive likelihood ratio, negative likelihood ratio, and diagnostic odds ratio. CONCLUSION: The findings of this study may provide helpful evidence for the impact of CU for early diagnosis of CAS. SYSTEMATIC REVIEW REGISTRATION: PROSPERO CRD42019153904.

The prognostic value of node status in different breast cancer subtypes.

Nodal metastases and breast cancer subtypes (BCS) are both well-recognized prognostic indicators. However, the association between nodal metastases and BCS, and the prognostic value of nodal metastases in different BCS are still remains unclear. Our aim was to investigate the association between nodal metastases and BCS, and the prognostic value of nodal metastases in the different BCS.We found that the breast cancer subtype was closely associated with the pN stage. pN stage and breast cancer subtype were significantly associated with disease-free survival. The subgroup analysis showed that the patients in higher pN stage had a poor outcome than patients in lower pN stage in each breast cancer subtype. Furthermore, when the analysis was stratified by breast cancer subtype, we found that even in the same pN stage (pN0-pN2), there was significant survival difference among patients in different BCS, and Luminal A breast cancer patients had the best survival outcome. However, there were no significant survival difference between Luminal A patients and other breast cancer subtype when patients in pN3 stage. Thus, our study suggested that both lymph node status and molecular subtype played important roles in the outcome of breast cancer patients and they cannot replace each other.