Diagnosis of type 2 Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM) using Paired microRNAs

Type 2 Diabetes mellitus (T2DM) is one of the most common diseases in the world and its prevalence ratio is still increasing. Patients with T2DM have diverse pathophysiological changes like as macrovascular, microvascular diseases, cancers as well as abnormal glucose metabolism. Thus, there are urgent needs to develop relevant biomarkers for the broad range of pathophysiology in patients with T2DM. We analyzed the signatures of serum miRNAs with the miRNA array analysis and reverse-transcription based quantitative polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR) in 50 patients with type 2 DM (T2DM) and 15 normal subjects. Array analysis showed that 19 miRNAs were up-regulated more than 2-fold and 71 miRNAs were down-regulated less than 0.5 in T2DM in comparison with normal subjects. Top 5 of up-regulated miRNAs were miR-3619-3p, miR-557, miR-6850-5p, miR-3648, miR-4730, and 5 of most down-regulated miRNAs were miR-5100, miR-4454, miR-1260b, miR-7975, miR-6131. We selected 4 miRNAs for validation analysis with RT-qPCR based on the abundance enough for reliable analyses and disease-specificities reported in previous reports. Serum miR-126-3p was down-regulated (3.21-fold, p<0.05) in T2DM, and miR-10a up-regulated (1.94-fold, p<0.05). However, none of single miRNA had significant correlation with clinical data and state. Data of the paired miRNAs: miR-10a and miR-200c, or miR-126 and miR-10a, clearly differentiated T2DM patients from normal subjects (p<0.05). Our study showed the paired-miRNA analyses as the more effective diagnostics for T2DM than the single miRNA analysis.