Serum VEGF level is regarded to be a biomarker for the diagnosis of stroke. Even though there have been published plethora of original articles describing higher blood VEGF concentrations since the 1970s, however, there is no any meta-analysis report for serum VEGF levels in the field of evidence-based medicine yet. A systematic review was performed by searching the online biomedical databases including retrieving 14 case–control studies including within-article subgroups after fulfilling the inclusion and exclusion criteria without the beginning date restriction, until 2020 for ischemic stroke patients. The Q quantity and I²% statistic index showed a high heterogeneity (84.895 and 84.687, respectively) and the random-effects model of meta-analysis was applied for further analyses. The meta-analysis on a total number of 769 stroke subjects and 621 controls found that the weighted pooled SMD for overall serum VEGF levels on different days of testing was 1.92 (95% CI, − 4.059–0.219, p value = 0.079) and the pooled SMD for overall serum VEGF levels on day 1 of testing was − 1.083 (95% CI, − 4.229–2.063, p value = 0.500). The meta-regression results demonstrated that different days of testing do not significantly affect serum VEGF concentrations in ischemic patients and actually their serum levels are time-independent. Based on the recently published studies, this meta-analysis showed that serum VEGF levels were not significantly associated with an ischemic stroke diagnosis. Thus, researchers may concern another ideal serum or cerebrospinal fluid-derived biomarker for stroke diagnosis.

血清VEGF水平被认为是中风诊断的生物标志物。尽管自1970年代以来已经发表了大量描述较高血液VEGF浓度的原始文章，但是，在循证医学领域尚无关于血清VEGF水平的荟萃分析报告。通过搜索在线生物医学数据库进行了系统的综述，包括在没有开始日期限制的情况下（直到2020年）针对缺血性中风患者检索了14例病例对照研究，包括在研究对象内的亚组。Q数量和I ²％统计指标显示出较高的异质性（分别为84.895和84.687），并采用了荟萃分析的随机效应模型进行进一步分析。对总计769名中风受试者和621名对照的荟萃分析发现，在测试的不同日期，总血清SMD的加权合并SMD为1.92（95％CI，-4.059-0.219，p值= 0.079），并且测试第1天的总SMD血清总VEGF水平为− 1.083（95％CI，− 4.229–2.063，p值= 0.500）。荟萃回归结果表明，不同天的测试不会明显影响缺血患者的血清VEGF浓度，实际上他们的血清水平与时间无关。根据最近发表的研究，这项荟萃分析显示血清VEGF水平与缺血性中风的诊断无显着相关性。因此，研究人员可能会关注另一种理想的血清或脑脊髓液衍生的生物标志物，用于中风诊断。