Evaluation of expression of biomarkers of PLAGL1 (ZAC1), microRNA, and their non-coding RNAs in patients with endometriosis

Circulating microRNAs as Non-Invasive Biomarkers in Endometriosis Diagnosis—A Systematic Review

“…Fourteen studies included patients with endometriosis stage I to IV based on the ASRM classification [20,25,26,28,30,31,34,[38][39][40][41][42][43]49]. Women with moderate-to-severe endometriosis (stage III to IV) were included in ten studies [22,23,27,37,44,45,47,48,50,51]. Six studies did not mention the stage of endometriosis [29,32,33,35,36,46], and the remaining two studies included only women with stage I to II [24] and II to IV [21], respectively.…”

“…The control groups consisted of self-reported healthy women or patients with symptoms suggestive of endometriosis which could not be confirmed or women with other benign gynecological conditions. The majority of the studies included patients with no use of hormonal treatment in the last 3 months [20,[22][23][24][25][26][27]31,32,34,35,37,38,42,43,45,47,50,51]; Gu et al [46] and Bahramy et al [48] even decided to not include patients who took hormonal treatment during the last 6 months. Ten studies did not specify the hormonal treatment of the included patients [21,[29][30][31]33,36,39,40,44,49].…”

“…Nisenblat et al [42] and Vanhie et al [43] even distinguished a third phase: the menstrual phase. Only women in the secretory stage were included in the studies by Gu et al [46] and Tahermanesh et al [50], while Hu et al [27] and Neuhausser et al [32] solely collected samples in the proliferative phase. Altogether, 471 patients were in the secretory phase at the time of sampling, while 519 patients were in the proliferative phase and 38 in the menstrual phase.…”

“…Sixteen studies investigated the presence of miRNA in serum [20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35], and an equal number of studies did so in plasma [36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51]. In some cases, the selection of miRNAs was conducted based on a literature review of existing studies [22,[25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32]34,35,39,40,44,47,48,51].…”

“…In some cases, the selection of miRNAs was conducted based on a literature review of existing studies [22,[25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32]34,35,39,40,44,47,48,51]. Two studies used online databases for targeted analysis to predict miRNAs' target genes [33,50]. In other cases, the presence of miRNAs was screened by microarray [20,21,23,27,37,41,42,46], RT-qPCR [36,38] or NGS [24,43,45,49].…”