Bridging Oral Pathology with Diagnostics by Comparative Analysis of Oral Fibrosis as a Precursor to Carcinogenesis: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Oral Submucous Fibrosis (OSF) is a chronic, potentially malignant condition that causes progressive fibrosis of the oral mucosa because people consume areca nuts. The purpose of this systematic review and meta-analysis was to compile the most recent data on molecular changes in OSF and assess how they relate to malignant transformation. Methods: A PRISMA-guided thorough search of PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar was carried out through March 2025. Original studies assessing molecular or cellular alterations in OSF (with or without comparisons to oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) or normal mucosa) were eligible. RevMan 5.4 was used to conduct the meta-analysis, and GRADE was used to evaluate the degree of evidence certainty, the Newcastle Ottawa tool, and the QUIN Tool for risk of bias. Results: Eleven studies satisfied the requirements to be included. The main molecular changes were abnormal expression of p53 and Ki67, upregulation of hTERT, shifts in EMT markers, and dysregulation of TGF-β/SMAD signaling. The pooled effect sizes for EMT stemness -0.67 [-1.09, -0.25, I2 = 0%, p=0.0016], for proliferation 4.49 [1.68, 7.29, I2= 96.8%, p=0.0017], for telomerase activation -0.63 [-5.93, 4.68, I2 = 98.3%, p= 0.8172], for signaling pathway mediators -429.76 [-1289.16, 429.94, I2 = 98.2%, p = 0.3272]. The investigators assigned a moderate rating to evidence certainty. Discussion: The molecular alterations in OSF are persistent and strongly suggest a risk of malignant cell transformation. Healthcare practitioners may be able to improve their early disease detection and risk level classification with the use of molecular biomarkers.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.017 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".