Plasma mir-203a-3p as a Novel Diagnostic Biomarker in Patients with Parkinson’s Disease Dementia

Abstract

Early detection of cognitive decline and in-time non-pharmacological management or drug therapy are extremely important in providing care for Parkinson’s disease with dementia (PDD). In this study, we firstly conducted a discovery study to identify 6 plasma microRNAs that may differentiate PD with or without mild cognitive impairment via NGS sequencing. Total 120 participants were further recruited in validation cohort and divided into 4 subgroups, including normal controls (HC), PD with no dementia (PDND), PD with mild cognitive impairment (PD-MCI) and PDD. Among the 6 candidates, miR-203a-3p was successfully detected in the plasma of the validation cohort using droplet digital PCR (ddPCR). Our results showed that the ratio of miR-203a-3p/miR-16-5p observed in PDD was significantly increased compared to PD-MCI (p < 0.001) and PDND (p = 0.041). Moreover, the ratio of miR-203a-3p/miR-16-5p showed a significant correlation with MoCA scores (r = -0.237, p = 0.024) in patients with PD (PwP). The ROC curve of the logistic regression model, consisting variates of age, the ratio of miR-203a-3p/miR-16-5p and the score of UPDRS III, also demonstrated an average AUC of 0.883 by 5-fold cross-validation. In conclusion, the ratio of miR-203a-3p/miR-16-5p may serve as a potential biomarker for distinguishing cognitive dysfunction from PwP.