Diagnostic value of blood-derived microRNAs for schizophrenia: results of a meta-analysis and validation

Abstract

There is an increasing interest in searching biomarkers for schizophrenia (SZ) diagnosis, which overcomes the drawbacks inherent with the subjective diagnostic methods. MicroRNA (miRNA) fingerprints have been explored for disease diagnosis. We performed a meta-analysis to examine miRNA diagnostic value for SZ and further validated the meta-analysis results. Using following terms: schizophrenia/SZ, microRNA/miRNA, diagnosis, sensitivity and specificity, we searched databases restricted to English language and reviewed all articles published from January 1990 to October 2016. All extracted data were statistically analyzed and the results were further validated with peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMNCs) isolated from patients and healthy controls using RT-qPCR and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis. A total of 6 studies involving 330 patients and 202 healthy controls were included for meta-analysis. The pooled sensitivity, specificity and diagnostic odds ratio were 0.81 (95% CI: 0.75-0.86), 0.81 (95% CI: 0.72-0.88) and 18 (95% CI: 9-34), respectively; the positive and negative likelihood ratio was 4.3 and 0.24 respectively; the area under the curve in summary ROC was 0.87 (95% CI: 0.84-0.90). Validation revealed that miR-181b-5p, miR-21-5p, miR-195-5p, miR-137, miR-346 and miR-34a-5p in PBMNCs had high diagnostic sensitivity and specificity in the context of schizophrenia. In conclusion, blood-derived miRNAs might be promising biomarkers for SZ diagnosis.

Effects of HTR1B 3' region polymorphisms and functional regions on gene expression regulation

“…Predicting miRNAs binding to HTR1B, we found that starBase and RNAHybrid yielded miR-96 [12]. found that miR-21 in peripheral blood is a highly sensitive and specific biomarker for the diagnosis of schizophrenia [20]. MicroR-21 was also significantly decreased in the peripheral blood of schizophrenic patients after antipsychotic treatment [14].…”

Epigenetic Modifications in Schizophrenia and Related Disorders: Molecular Scars of Environmental Exposures and Source of Phenotypic Variability

“…Importantly, among the differentially expressed miRNAs, 11 could be used to dissociate schizophrenia samples from control samples with 75% to 90% accuracy (90). Despite this remarkable precision, however, blood miRNA profiling tends to produce equivocal results in the context of schizophrenia, with biomarker candidates varying across independent studies (91)(92)(93). While this variability may arise from various cofounding effects, including differences in the type of tissue, low sample size, and smoking-related epigenetic effects (94), it may also mirror the disorder's etiological (and phenotypic) heterogeneity (95,96).…”

Non-Invasive Colorectal Cancer Screening: An Overview

“…However, the major shortcoming of using blood-based miRNA for CRC screening is the detection specificity. This is because miRNAs might arise from other cancer(s) [64,65], depression [66], and virus infection(s) [67,68]. Therefore, faecal-based miRNA detection may be an alternative option [57,59,60,69].…”