Diagnostic potential of circulating microRNA in vascular cognitive impairment / 中国组织工程研究

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: To date, vascular cognitive impairment (VCI) still lacks effective therapeutic strategy and objective diagnostic tool. Circulating microRNA is considered as a promising diagnostic biomarker due to its advantages of easy acquisition, non-invasive collection, easy detection, strong specificity, and stable expression. OBJECTIVE: To review domestic and foreign studies of microRNAs in VCI diagnosis. METHODS: Literatures published from January 2009 to January 2020 were searched in PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, Embase, OVID, CNKI and WanFang databases with keywords of “microRNA, vascular cognitive impairment, post-stroke cognitive impairment, diagnosis, biomarker ” in English and Chinese, respectively. Finally, 42 literatures were included for analysis. RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: Compared with the normal cognitive population, differentially expressed microRNAs are found in the serum, plasma and cerebrospinal fluid of VCI patients, and the expression levels of some microRNAs are correlated with the cognitive assessment score. Taking together, circulating microRNA is a new biomarker with potential diagnostic value for VCI. However, the clinical application of microRNAs in VCI still has a large room for development due to the small sample size and low specificity or sensitivity of candidate microRNAs.