Circulating MicroRNA Expression Levels Associated With Internet Gaming Disorder

Abstract

Background: Addictive use of the Internet and online games is a potential psychiatric disorder termed Internet gaming disorder (IGD). Altered microRNA (miRNA) expression profiles have been reported in blood and brain tissue of patients with certain psychiatric disorders and suggested as biomarkers. However, there have been no reports on blood miRNA profiles in IGD.Methods: To discover IGD-associated miRNAs, we analyzed the miRNA expression profiles of 51 samples (25 IGD and 26 controls) using the TaqMan Low Density miRNA Array. For validation, we performed quantitative reverse transcription PCR with 36 independent samples (20 IGD and 16 controls).results: Through discovery and independent validation, we identified three miRNAs (hsa-miR-200c-3p, hsa-miR-26b-5p, hsa-miR-652-3p) that were significantly downregu lated in the IGD group. Individuals with all three miRNA alterations had a much higher risk of IGD than those with no alteration [odds ratio (OR) 22, 95% CI 2.29-211.11], and the ORs increased dose dependently with number of altered miRNAs. The predicted target genes of the three miRNAs were associated with neural pathways. We explored the protein expression of the three downstream target genes by western blot and confirmed that expression of GABRB2 and DPYSL2 was significantly higher in the IGD group.conclusion: We observed that expressions of hsa-miR-200c-3p, hsa-miR-26b-5p, and hsa-miR-652-3p were downregulated in the IGD patients. Our results will be helpful to understand the pathophysiology of IGD.

The light response in chickens divergently selected for feather pecking behavior reveals mechanistic insights towards psychiatric disorders

“…GABRB2 is an ionotropic type A γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) receptor, which has been linked to schizophrenia in multiple studies (reviewed in [ 12 ]). Downregulation of multiple miRNAs has been shown to have an impact on GABRB2 protein levels in humans with internet gaming disorder [ 13 ]. Furthermore, it was recently shown in a murine knockout model that the lack of GABRB2 leads to various schizophrenia-like symptoms [ 14 ], which goes in line with our observations.…”

Peripheral Blood Circular RNAs as a Biomarker for Major Depressive Disorder and Prediction of Possible Pathways

“…The above information suggested that hsa_circ_0079651, hsa_circ_0137187, hsa_circ_0006010, and hsa_circ_0113010 are suspected of being involved in the neuroplasticity of MDD, although the specific mechanism requires additional investigation. In the ceRNA network, 11 related miRNAs were discovered ( Figure 3A ); among them, hsa-miR-103a-3p ( Devoto et al, 2020 ), hsa-miR-27a-3p ( Sala Frigerio et al, 2013 ), and hsa-miR-200c-3p ( Lee et al, 2018 ) were abnormal in neuropsychiatric diseases in previous investigations. Among the 36 mRNAs associated with the ceRNA network ( Figure 3A ), 3 mRNAs had been reported to be related to depression (DDIT4, S100B, Fbln2).…”

Identification of serum microRNA signatures associated with autism spectrum disorder as promising candidate biomarkers

“…This process allows the study of CNS-derived miRNA fingerprints through a simple collection of accessible material, for example, blood or even saliva (Grasso et al, 2014;. Expression profiling of extracellular miRNAs as putative biomarkers for various CNS disorders has already been reported in studies focused on epilepsy (An et al, 2016;De Matteis et al, 2018;Wang et al, 2015a), Parkinson's disease (Chen et al, 2018), bipolar mania (Rong et al, 2011), depressive disorders (Wang et al, 2015b), vascular dementia (Ragusa et al, 2016), attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (Wu et al, 2015), schizophrenia (Vachev et al, 2016;Wei et al, 2015), Tourette syndrome (Rizzo et al, 2015), ASD (Cirnigliaro et al, 2017;Kichukova et al, 2017;Mundalil Vasu et al, 2014), posttraumatic stress (Balakathiresan et al, 2014), and even internet gaming disorder (Lee et al, 2018). Particularly for ASD, dysregulated miRNAs have been detected in samples from different origin such as brain cortex and cerebellum (Ander et al, 2015;Schumann et al, 2017), peripheral blood (Huang et al, 2015), serum (Kichukova et al, 2017;Mundalil Vasu et al, 2014), saliva , olfactory mucosal stem cells (Nguyen et al, 2016), monocytes (Jyonouchi et al, 2017), and lymphoblastoid cell lines (Sarachana et al, 2010).…”