Circulating MicroRNA as Potential Source for Neurodegenerative Diseases Biomarkers

An increasing number of circulating micro-ribonucleic acids (microRNAs, miRNAs) have been discovered its potential as biomarkers to diagnose neurodegenerative diseases (NDs) by many researchers. However, there were obvious inconsistencies among previous studies, and thus we performed this meta-analysis to evaluate whether miRNA is an effective biomarker with high accuracy to diagnose the NDs. PubMed, MEDLINE, EMBASE, the Cochrane Library, and other related databases were used to search eligible articles. The data of sensitivity and specificity were employed to plot the summary receiver operator characteristic (SROC) curve and calculate the area under the SROC curve (AUC). I (2) test were used to estimate the heterogeneity among different studies. In addition, the possible sources of heterogeneity were further explored by subgroup analyses and meta-regression. All analyses were performed by STATA 12.0 software. In this meta-analysis, eight publications with 459 NDs patients and 340 healthy controls were included to investigate the diagnostic performance of circulating miRNAs for NDs. The overall sensitivity and specificity, positive likelihood ratio (PLR), negative likelihood ration (NLR), and diagnostic odds ratio (DOR) were 0.83 (95 % confidence interval (CI) 0.77-0.88), 0.87 (95 % CI 0.83-0.89), 6.2 (95 % CI 4.9-7.9), 0.19 (95 % CI 0.14-0.27), 33 (95 % CI 20-52), and 0.91 (95 % CI: 0.88-0.93), respectively. The overall SROC curve was plotted with AUC of 0.91 (95 % CI 0.88-0.93), which indicated an excellent diagnostic performance of circulating miRNA for NDs. Subgroup analysis based on miRNA profile demonstrated that multiple-miRNA assay had higher diagnostic accuracy for NDs when compared with single-miRNA assay. In conclusion, the circulating miRNAs may be the potential biomarkers in the clinical diagnosis of NDs, and the diagnostic accuracy would be better by using multiple-miRNA assay. However, large-scale studies are still needed to explore the relation between the circulating miRNA dysregulation and the pathological mechanism of NDs.