Decreased urinary uromodulin is potentially associated with acute kidney injury: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Urinary uromodulin (uUMOD) is one of the novel biomarkers for predicting AKI. However, currently available publications showed inconsistent results. We designed this meta-analysis to evaluate the potential association between uUMOD and AKI. We searched research articles with no language restriction in Medline, Web of Science, Cochrane Library, Embase, and 3 Chinese datasets from inception to February 2021. We used random-effects models to estimate the standardized mean difference (SMD) between patients with AKI or not, while the leave-one-out method and random-effects meta-regression to evaluate the sensitivity and the impact of potential confounders such as age and surgery. The meta-analysis comprising 3148 subjects from 11 studies showed that the uUMOD of the AKI group is significantly lower than the non-AKI group (SMD: - 0.71; 95% confidence interval (CI), - 1.00, - 0.42, P