evaluation of the clinical outcome of metastatic breast cancer patients with negative and positive circulating tumor dna: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Background and aim: the present study was conducted with the aim of evaluating the clinical outcome of metastatic breast cancer patients with negative and positive circulating tumor dna. material and methods: searching international databases pubmed, web of science, scopus, science direct, web of knowledge, ebsco, wiley, isi, elsevier, embase databases, and google scholar search engine based on prisma 2020-27-item checklist and keywords related to the objectives of the study, it was carried out from 2019 to february 2024. a model with fixed effect and inverse–variance method was used. all statistical analyses are done using stata/mp software. v17 was done considering the significance of less than 0.05. results: six studies were selected according to the inclusion criteria. compared with patients with negative ctdna, those with positive ctdna had a higher risk for progression-free survival and overall survival (hr 2.02, 95% ci 0.71-3.33; p-value < 0.001) and (hr 2.78, 95% ci 1.47-4.10; p-value < 0.001), respectively. conclusions: in metastatic breast cancer patients, it was individually and jointly associated with progression-free survival and overall survival-positive circulating tumor dna.