<p>MicroRNA-Based Biomarkers in the Diagnosis and Monitoring of Therapeutic Response in Patients with Depression</p>

Abstract

Depression is a debilitating mental illness that affects up to 120 million people worldwide; it is currently determined based on subjective diagnostic schemes that are limited by high uncertainty. Hence, there is an urgent need to identify effective and reliable biomarkers to increase diagnostic accuracy. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) constitute a recently discovered class of non-coding RNAs that play a key role in the regulation of gene expression by modulating translation, messenger RNA (mRNA) degradation, or stability of mRNA targets. Dysregulated expression of miRNAs is being investigated as a clinical biomarker for a variety of diseases, including depression. Accumulating evidence has shown that miRNAs participate in many aspects of neural plasticity, neurogenesis, and the stress response. This is supported by more direct studies based on human postmortem brain tissue that strongly indicate that miRNAs not only play a key role in the pathogenesis of major depressive disorder, but also present potential for the development of therapeutic targets. miRNAs in the peripheral and central nervous system are being considered as potential biomarkers in the diagnosis of depression and in monitoring the therapeutic response to antidepressants, owing to their stability, tissue-specificity, and disease-specific expression. In this review, we focus on various miRNAs in tissues and fluids that could be employed as diagnostic and therapeutic biomarkers in patients with depression.

Berberine Suppresses Mice Depression Behaviors and Promotes Hippocampal Neurons Growth Through Regulating the miR-34b-5p/miR-470-5p/BDNF Axis

“… 33 , 34 MiRNAs have been proven to be used for the diagnosis and treatment biomarkers of depression. 35 , 36 Here, we found that Berberine could regulate miR-34b-5p, miR-470-5p and BDNF expression, so we speculated that Berberine regulated the progression of depression disorder through miRNA/mRNA axis. Around this hypothesis, a series of experiments were carried out.…”

The Importance of Epigenetics in Diagnostics and Treatment of Major Depressive Disorder

“…Although collection of CSF is not as easy as collection of blood, it is thought to better represent fluctuations in miRNAs status than peripheral tissue or even post-mortem brain samples [ 158 , 159 ]. Its close interaction with the brain makes CSF an ideal candidate for study changes in the CNS [ 160 , 161 ].…”

“…Since miRNA concentration can rapidly change in order to compensate for changes in environment [ 164 ], they seem to be perfect candidates for such markers [ 165 ]. Indeed, a great body of evidence was provided by clinical, preclinical and in vitro studies showing that changes of miRNA expression can reflect the progress of depression treatment ( Table 5 ) [ 159 ].…”

The Prognostic Role of Micro-RNAs in Head and Neck Cancers: An Umbrella Review

“…Even if the body of evidence in relation to miRNAs and HNC prognosis is growing, there is wide variability among studies regarding aims, miRNA measurement methods, tumor sites and different miRNAs among studies [ 1 ]; in fact, miRNA can be detected in both extracellular and intracellular environments. In addition, consistency between many miRNA signatures is lacking, and the differences may be due to source of miRNA, sample size and comorbidities of the studied samples [ 8 ]. Recently, in order to address the significance of miRNAs as potential prognosticators in HNC, some articles [ 1 , 9 ] studied the impact of miRNA by identifying the pooled effect size across all HNC prognostic studies, resulting in a summary estimates of the relationship between miRNAs expression and risk of death via pooling the hazard ratio across all selected studies with the aim of providing a better understanding of the survival outcome of HNC patients.…”