A comprehensive review and meta-analysis of suPAR as a predictor of acute kidney injury.

Introduction and objective: The global impact of acute kidney injury (AKI) has not been thoroughly investigated. With the development of new techniques, soluble urokinase plasminogen activator receptor (suPAR) has become increasingly important in the diagnosis of AKI. Therefore, a systematic review and meta-analysis was carried out to evaluate the predictive value of suPAR for AKI.

Material and methods: The review and meta-analysis investigated the relationship between suPAR levels and acute kidney injury. Pubmed, Scopus, Cochrane Controlled Register of Trials, and Embase were searched for relevant studies from inception to 10 January 2023. Stata (Ver. 16 StataCorp, College Station, TX, USA) was used for all statistical analyses. A random effects model using the Mantel-Haenszel approach was employed, and odds ratios (OR) and standard mean differences (SMD) with 95% confidence intervals (CI) were calculated for binary and continuous outcomes, respectively.

Results: Nine studies reported suPAR levels among patients with and without AKI. Pooled analysis showed that suPAR levels in patients with and without AKI varied and amounted to 5.23 ± 4.07 vs. 3.23 ±0.67 ng/mL (SMD = 3.19; 95%CI: 2.73 to 3.65; p<0.001). The results from the sensitivity analysis did not alter the direction.

Conclusions: This results show that increasing suPAR levels are associated with the occurrence of AKI. SuPAR might act as a novel biomarker for CI-AKI in clinical practice.