Expressions and clinical significance of miR-9 and miR-214 in diabetic nephropathy

Objective To detect the plasma expression levels of microRNA-9 (miR-9) and microRNA-214 (miR-214) in patients with diabetic nephropathy (DN) and explore the clinical significance of miR-9 and miR-214 in DN.Methods From March 2018 to June 2020,113 hospitalized DN patients were divided into two groups of microalbuminuria (ACR:30~300 mg/g,n=63) and large albuminuria (ACR>300 mg/g,n=50) according to the albumin/creatinine ratio (ACR).And 115 healthy volunteers were selected as control group.Plasma levels of miR-9/miR-214 were detected by real-time fluorescent quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR).Pearson's method was utilized for examining the correlations between plasma expression levels of miR-9/miR-214 and biochemical parameters.Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was plotted for analyzing the predictive value of miR-9/miR-214 expression in DN.Results Compared with those in control group,the levels of glycosylated hemoglobin (HbA1c),total cholesterol (TC),triglyceride (TG),uric acid (UA),cystatin C (CysC),serum creatinine (Scr) and miR-9 were significantly elevated while the levels of miR-214 and estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) dropped markedly in diabetic and DN groups (P<0.05);compared with those in diabetic group,the levels of HbA1c,TC,TG,UA,CysC,SCr and miR-9 were significantly higher while the levels of miR-214 and eGFR lower in DN group (P<0.05);Compared with microalbuminuria group,plasma level of miR-9 spiked markedly and miR-214 level dropped significantly in macroalbuminuria group (P<0.05);plasma expression of miR-9 was correlated positively with CysC/SCr (P<0.05) and negatively with eGFR (P<0.05).And plasma expression of miR-214 was correlated negatively with CysC/SCr (P<0.05) and positively with eGFR (P<0.05);the sensitivity,specificity and area under curve (AUC) of miR-9/miR-214 were 88.50%,85.22% and 0.921 respectively.Conclusion Plasma expression of miR-9 is significantly higher and the expression of miR-214 lower in DN patients.Correlated with the severity of DN,miR-9 and miR-214 may be employed as potential diagnostic markers for DN.