Letter to the editor regarding the article "Prognostic role of long noncoding RNA NEAT1 in various carcinomas: a meta-analysis".

Dear editor

With great interest, we read Chen et al’s paper entitled “Prognostic role of long noncoding RNA NEAT1 in various carcinomas: a meta-analysis”.1 The authors stated that high expression of NEAT1 might potentially serve as a reliable biomarker for poor clinical outcome in various cancers.

After reviewing the article, we found an error that should be double checked and be corrected. The data (hazard ratio [HR] =2.17, 95% confidence intervals: 0.65–7.23 P=0.208) Chen et al extracted from Sun et al’s paper based on the survival curve indicated that the expression of long noncoding RNA NEAT1 was not related to prognosis, which conflicts with the conclusion of Sun et al. However, Sun et al indicated that the patients with tumors with high NEAT1 expression had a shorter overall survival than patients whose tumors had low NEAT1 expression (P=0.061).2 As we know that the HR and P-values obtained by the curve are offset from the values obtained from the original data calculations, therefore, we suggest the authors contact Sun et al to verify the article data and to obtain the true values. Nevertheless, we still appreciate the authors efforts in studying the correlation between IncRNA NEAT1 and various carcinomas.