Because studies were found to be heterogeneous, proportion of patients with positive LN metastasis for the respective nodal station with corresponding 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were calculated using random-effects modeling after DerSimonian and Laird [ 18].
Subgroup analyses were conducted for different subtypes, which included sample types (tissue or serum), counterpart categories (autogenous or heterogeneous), proportion of stage I, aim of the study (for diagnosis or non-diagnosis), ratio of adenocarcinoma to squamous (Ad2Sc), primer categories (sets I and II) (Additional file 1: Table S2) and other possible confounding factors (Table 2).
As compared with the immunophenotypic patterns of normal B-lymphoid lineage, common ALL patients had leukemia cells with the normal B-cell developmental immunophenotype, but each patient mostly had heterogeneous proportions of cell subpopulations (Table 2).
Nine variables were analyzed in meta-regression, including control types (autogenous and heterogeneous), gender proportion, proportion of TNM stage I samples, mean or median age (> 65 or ≤ 65), single or multiple target detection, sample types (serum or tissue), methylation detection methods (MSP, qMSP), study designs (diagnosis or non-diagnosis) and primer sets.
In papillary carcinomas, the expression of p14ARF and p16INK4A was heterogeneous with equal proportions of tumours overexpressing or downexpressing p14ARFor p14ARFor.
Elsewhere, transmission is highly heterogeneous, with a small proportion of municipalities reporting a high proportion of the total cases.
Common diseases are highly heterogeneous, with a small proportion of cases having relatively simple etiology dominated by a single genetic mutation, while the vast majority of cases are caused by the combined effect of multiple genetic and environmental factors each contributing a minor influence.
ALS is clinically heterogeneous, and a significant proportion of cases clinically shows relative selectivity for LMN or UMN involvement.
Interestingly, induction of σB activity was heterogeneous, with only a proportion of the cells in the wt- egfp population being fluorescent above the background autofluorescence level.
However, tumours within the same stage are biologically and molecularly heterogeneous, and a significant proportion of stage II patients develop metastatic disease despite apparently curative surgery [ 4, 5].
Accumulating evidence suggests that tumour-initiating cells (TICs) or cancer stem cells which make up only a small proportion of heterogeneous tumour cells possess a greater ability to maintain tumour formation than other tumour cell types.
