AUTHOR=Li Xiongfei , Ren Fan , Wang Shuhang , He Zhicheng , Song Zuoqing , Chen Jun , Xu Song 

TITLE=The Epidemiology of Ground Glass Opacity Lung Adenocarcinoma: A Network-Based Cumulative Meta-Analysis

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Oncology

VOLUME=10

YEAR=2020

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/oncology/articles/10.3389/fonc.2020.01059

DOI=10.3389/fonc.2020.01059

ISSN=2234-943X

ABSTRACT=<p><bold>Introduction:</bold> Due to the introduction of low-dose computed tomography (CT) and screening procedures, the proportion of early-stage lung cancer with ground glass opacity (GGO) manifestation is increasing in clinical practice. However, its epidemiological characteristics is still not fully investigated.</p><p><bold>Methods:</bold> We retrieved all solitary GGO adenocarcinoma lung cancer (ADLC) on the PubMed, Cochrane Library, and Embase databases until January 1, 2019 and extracted the general information to perform the meta-analysis, mainly focusing on age, gender, and smoking status.</p><p><bold>Results:</bold> A total of 8,793 solitary GGO ADLC patients from 53 studies were included in this analysis. The final pooled analysis showed that the female proportion, average diagnosis age, and non-smoking proportion of solitary GGO ADLC was 0.62 (95% CI, 0.60–0.64), 56.97 (95% CI, 54.56–59.37), and 0.72 (95% CI, 0.66–0.77), respectively. The cumulative meta-analysis and meta-trend analysis confirmed that the average age at diagnosis has been decreasing while the non-smoking proportion significantly increased in the past two decades.</p><p><bold>Conclusions:</bold> From our epidemiological analysis, it demonstrates that the clinical characteristics of GGO lung cancer patients may be out of the high-risk factors. Therefore, we propose to reconsider the risk assessment and current lung cancer screening criteria.</p>