Diagnostic performance of microRNA-29a in active pulmonary tuberculosis: a systematic review and meta-analysis

•A meta-analysis was applied to analyze the performance of miRNA-29a in diagnosing active pulmonary tuberculosis.•miRNA-29a can be used as a biomarker for the diagnosis of active tuberculosis.•Tuberculosis burden and sample type of miRNA-29a may influence its diagnostic performance. In recent years, more and more studies have shown that microRNA-29a (miRNA-29a) can be used as a potential biomarker for active tuberculosis, but the results of these studies are not consistent. To comprehensively evaluate the value of miRNA-29a in the diagnosis of active tuberculosis by meta-analysis. The databases of CNKI, WanFang, PubMed, The Cochrane Library, Web of Science and EMBASE were searched for relevant studies. Studies were screened strictly according to inclusion and exclusion criteria. QUADAS-2 scale was used to evaluate the quality of the included studies. Data were extracted and analyzed by Meta-DiSc 1.4 and Stata 16.0 software. 13 articles were included, including a total of 1598 subjects, including 872 active tuberculosis patients and 726 controls. The combined sensitivity and specificity of miRNA-29a in the diagnosis of active tuberculosis were 78 % and 76 %, respectively, and the area under the overall summary receiver operating characteristic curve was 0.8564. miRNA-29a can be used as a biomarker for the diagnosis of active tuberculosis.