Background: Glioblastoma (GBM) is the most common primary malignant tumor in adult central nervous system and results in disappointing survival outcomes. Although the diagnosis and therapy approach have been developed recently, the prognosis of GBM remains poor. A novel, minimally invasive biomarker for GBM is necessary for early diagnosis or prognosis prediction. Methods: All circRNAs were detected by qRT-PCR in GBM samples including training and validation sets. We used the risk score analysis to assume the diagnosis ability for GBM. The receiver operating characteristic curve was also employed. Results: Among the 14 candidates, circRNA, circNT5E, circFOXO3, circ_0001946, circ_0029426, circ-SHPRH, and circMMP9 were detected with increased levels in the training set. Further investigation in the validation set indicated that circFOXO3, circ_0029426, and circ-SHPRH might be the fingerprints for GBM compared with controls. The risk score analysis revealed that the combination of three circRNAs could distinguish the GBM from healthy control with the area under curve value of 0.980 and 0.906, respectively. Conclusion: The three circRNAs might be novel fingerprints for predicting the occurrence of GBM.

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a chronic and progressive degenerative disease of the central nervous system. Degenerative neuropathy can occur in patients with PD even before typical clinical symptoms appear in the preclinical stage. Therefore, if the early diagnosis of degenerative diseases can be timely and the correlation with the disease progression can be explored, the disease progression will be slowed down and the quality of life of patients will be improved. In this study, the circRNA microarray was employed to screen the dysregulated circRNA in plasma samples of PD. Four circRNAs (circ_0085869, circ_0004381, circ_0017204, and circ_0090668) were obtained with increased levels in PD patients by cross comparison and preliminary verification in PD comparing with healthy controls. Further validation found the circRNA panel was consistent with the training set. The ROC curve also revealed a high diagnostic ability of circ_0004381 and circ_0017204 in predicting the early stage of PD from healthy controls. circ_0085869, circ_0004381, circ_0017204, and circ_0090668 also presented a high ability to distinguish the late stage of PD from early stage. In conclusion, circulating circRNA panel might be a potential fingerprint for predicting the early diagnosis of PD and may act as a biomarker for disease progression.

Gliomas are the most common primary tumors in adult central nervous system and result in disappointing survival outcomes. FOXL1, as a transcription factor, plays an important role in regulating the expression of genes involved in cell metabolism, proliferation and differentiation. In this study, we investigated the relationship between FOXL1 expression and prognosis of patients with glioma. We selected 611 glioma patients from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database and 132 glioma patients from Huai'an First People's Hospital (PFHH). The prognostic values of FOXL1 in glioma were analyzed in both cohorts. In TCGA cohort, the median (10.2389) was used as the cut-off value of FOXL1 mRNA levels in tumor tissue. Kaplan-Meier analysis showed that higher WHO glioma grade (P<0.001) and expression of FOXL1 (P<0.001) were associated with worse overall survival (OS). The univariate Cox regression model revealed that age (P<0.001), WHO grade (P<0.001), histological type (P<0.001) and FOXL1 expression (P<0.001) were associated with prognosis of glioma patients. In PFHH cohort, expression of FOXL1 in tumor cells was detected by immunohistochemistry (IHC) staining based on a tissue microarray (TMA) sample. Kaplan-Meier analysis also showed that WHO glioma grade (P<0.001) and expression of FOXL1 (P=0.012) were associated with OS in glioma patients. The univariate Cox regression showed that WHO grade (P=0.001), histological type (P<0.001) and FOXL1 expression (P=0.013) were associated with prognosis of glioma patients. In both cohorts Kaplan-Meier subgroup analyses showed FOXL expression correlated with OS in high WHO grade subgroup, while low grade subgroup showed no such correlation. This study showed that higher expression of FOXL1 is associated with poor OS of glioma patients in TCGA and PFHH cohorts. Especially, FOXL1 overexpression is associated with worse outcomes in high WHO grade subgroup. Our findings suggest that FOXL1 expression is a candidate predictor of clinical outcome in glioma patients and may act as an effective molecular marker for immunotherapeutic strategies of glioma patients in clinical practice.