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Circulating MicroRNA as Potential Source for Neurodegenerative Diseases Biomarkers

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Abstract

An increasing number of circulating micro-ribonucleic acids (microRNAs, miRNAs) have been discovered its potential as biomarkers to diagnose neurodegenerative diseases (NDs) by many researchers. However, there were obvious inconsistencies among previous studies, and thus we performed this meta-analysis to evaluate whether miRNA is an effective biomarker with high accuracy to diagnose the NDs. PubMed, MEDLINE, EMBASE, the Cochrane Library, and other related databases were used to search eligible articles. The data of sensitivity and specificity were employed to plot the summary receiver operator characteristic (SROC) curve and calculate the area under the SROC curve (AUC). I 2 test were used to estimate the heterogeneity among different studies. In addition, the possible sources of heterogeneity were further explored by subgroup analyses and meta-regression. All analyses were performed by STATA 12.0 software. In this meta-analysis, eight publications with 459 NDs patients and 340 healthy controls were included to investigate the diagnostic performance of circulating miRNAs for NDs. The overall sensitivity and specificity, positive likelihood ratio (PLR), negative likelihood ration (NLR), and diagnostic odds ratio (DOR) were 0.83 (95 % confidence interval (CI) 0.77–0.88), 0.87 (95 % CI 0.83–0.89), 6.2 (95 % CI 4.9–7.9), 0.19 (95 % CI 0.14–0.27), 33 (95 % CI 20–52), and 0.91 (95 % CI: 0.88–0.93), respectively. The overall SROC curve was plotted with AUC of 0.91 (95 % CI 0.88–0.93), which indicated an excellent diagnostic performance of circulating miRNA for NDs. Subgroup analysis based on miRNA profile demonstrated that multiple-miRNA assay had higher diagnostic accuracy for NDs when compared with single-miRNA assay. In conclusion, the circulating miRNAs may be the potential biomarkers in the clinical diagnosis of NDs, and the diagnostic accuracy would be better by using multiple-miRNA assay. However, large-scale studies are still needed to explore the relation between the circulating miRNA dysregulation and the pathological mechanism of NDs.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Shanghai Key Laboratory for Bone and Joint Disease Shanghai Institute of Traumatology and Orthopaedics, Ruijin Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, 197 Ruijin No. 2 Road, Shanghai, 200025, China

    Ying Zi & Lianfu Deng

  2. Department of Emergency, 463rd Hospital of PLA, Shenyang, 110042, China

    Ying Zi

  3. Department of Neurosurgery, 463rd Hospital of PLA, Shenyang, 110042, China

    Zhongmin Yin

  4. Department of Neurology, Shanghai Pudong Hospital, Fudan University, Shanghai, 201399, China

    Weizhong Xiao

  5. Department of Orthopedics, General Hospital of Shenyang Military Area Command of PLA, Rescue Center of Severe Wound and Trauma of PLA, Shenyang, 110016, China

    Xinwei Liu

  6. Department of Pharmacy, Changhai Hospital, Second Military Medical University, Shanghai, 200433, China

    Zhixiang Gao

  7. Department of Urology, Changhai Hospital, Second Military Medical University, 168 Changhai Road, Shanghai, 200433, China

    Li Jiao

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  1. Ying Zi
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  2. Zhongmin Yin
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  3. Weizhong Xiao
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  4. Xinwei Liu
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  5. Zhixiang Gao
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  6. Li Jiao
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  7. Lianfu Deng
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Correspondence to Li Jiao or Lianfu Deng.

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Y. Zi, Z. Yin, and W. Xiao contributed equally to this work.

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Zi, Y., Yin, Z., Xiao, W. et al. Circulating MicroRNA as Potential Source for Neurodegenerative Diseases Biomarkers. Mol Neurobiol 52, 1494–1503 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12035-014-8944-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12035-014-8944-x

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