TITLE:
MicroRNA profiling in sera of patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus reveals an upregulation of miR-31 expression in subjects with microvascular complications
AUTHORS:
Guido Sebastiani, Laura Nigi, Isabella Spagnuolo, Elena Morganti, Cecilia Fondelli, Francesco Dotta
KEYWORDS:
Type 2 Diabetes; microRNAs; Diabetic Chronic Complications; Microangiopathy
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Biomedical Science and Engineering,
Vol.6 No.5A,
May
28,
2013
ABSTRACT: Type 2 diabetes (T2D) is a
metabolic disease characterized by chronic hyperglycaemia due to a combination
of resistance to insulin action and an inadequate compensatory insulin
secretory response. Chronic hyperglycemia is associated with long-term micro-
and macrovascular complications leading to dysfunction of several organs
including kidney, heart, eye and nervous system. Early identification of
chronic diabetic complications is necessary in order to prevent dysfunction
and failure of these different organs. MicroRNAs (or miRNAs) are small endogenous RNAs, which negatively regulate
gene expression. Recently, it has been demonstrated that miRNAs can be secreted
by cells, thus being detectable in serum and in other biological fluids.
Circulating microRNAs have been proposed as possible biomarkers of several diseases. Here, we performed a miRNAs expression profiling in the sera of T2D
patients with or without vascular complications in order to find specific biomarkers
to characterize T2D complications. We analyzed the expression of 384
microRNAs in serum pools from 3 groups of T2D patients: 12 T2D patients without
any chronic complications, 12 T2D patients with macrovascular complications and
12 with microvascular complications. We found 223 miRNAs expressed in T2D,224 inT2D with microvascular and221 inT2D
with macrovascular complications. Among expressed microRNAs, 45 resulted
upregulated and 23 downregulated in microvascular patients sera, while 13 upregulated
and 41 downregulated in macrovascular T2D patients compared to those without
complications. We focused and validated microRNA miR-31 expression in single
sera from each group, which resulted significantly upregulated in patients with
microvascular complications and may be indeed related to the presence of
microangiopathy. In conclusion, our study has identified miR-31 as a promising
biomarker for diabetic microvascular complications; further prospective
studies in the clinical setting are however required to establish the real
utility of measuring serum circulating levels of this microRNA.