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Glioma is a brain tumor deriving from the neoplastic glial cells or neuroglia. Due to its resistance to anticancer drugs and different disease progress of individuals, patients with high-grade glioma are difficult to completely cure, leading to a poor prognosis and low overall survival. Therefore, there is an urgent need to look for prognostic and diagnostic indicators that can predict glioma grades. P53 is one of the widely studied biomarkers in human glioma. The purpose of this study was to comprehensively evaluate the significance of p53 expression in glioma grades and overall survival. We searched commonly used electronic databases to retrieve related articles of p53 expression in glioma. Overall, a total of 21 studies including 1322 glioma patients were finally screened out. We observed that the frequency of p53 immuno-positivity was higher in high-grade patients than that in low-grade category (63.8 vs. 41.6 %), and our statistic analysis indicated that p53 expression was associated with pathological grade of glioma (OR 2.93, 95 % CI 1.87-4.60, P < 0.00001). This significant correction was also found in 1-, 3- and 5-year overall survival. However, no positive relationship was found between age, sex, tumor size and p53 expression in patients with glioma. In conclusion, our results suggested that p53 immunohistochemical expression might have an effective usefulness in predicting the prognosis in patients with glioma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]