Abstract
Accidental radiation exposures such as industrial accidents and nuclear catastrophes pose a threat to human health, and the potential or substantial injury caused by ionizing radiation (IR) from medical treatment that cannot be ignored. Although the mechanisms of IR-induced damage to various organs have been gradually investigated, medical treatment of irradiated individuals is still based on clinical symptoms. Hence, minimally invasive biomarkers that can predict radiation damage are urgently needed for appropriate medical management after radiation exposure. In the field of radiation biomarker, finding molecular biomarkers to assess different levels of radiation damage is an important direction. In recent years, microRNAs have been widely reported as several diseases’ biomarkers, such as cancer and cardiovascular diseases, and microRNAs are also of interest to the ionizing radiation field as radiation response molecules, thus researchers are turning attention to the potential of microRNAs as biomarkers in tumor radiation response and the radiation toxicity prediction of normal tissues. In this review, we summarize the distribution of microRNAs, the progress on research of microRNAs as markers of IR, and make a hypothesis about the origin and destination of microRNAs in vivo after IR.
Highlights
The threat of accidental exposure to ionizing radiation is growing
A variety of biomarkers have been considered for dose estimation and damage assessment after radiation exposure, the development of new ionizing radiation marker molecules could help to further enrich the types of indicators for effective clinical triage
MiRNAs have been extensively studied as disease biomarkers due to their stable presence in body fluids, and current research in radiobiology has progressively elucidated the involvement of miRNAs in regulating the biological effects induced by ionizing radiation (IR)
Summary
The threat of accidental exposure to ionizing radiation is growing. Victims exposed to more than 1 Gy of IR can develop acute radiation syndrome (ARS) (Christensen et al, 2014), which affects the hematopoietic and gastrointestinal systems and causes radiation injury. The progression of ARS in humans exposed to high doses of radiation can be very rapid, which poses a great challenge for subsequent medical treatment. The identification of radiation injury is extremely crucial. Chromosomal aberration analysis, lymphocyte γ-H2AX foci analysis and lymphocyte count analysis are all existing biological dose estimation techniques (Wang et al, 2016). Despite the high sensitivity and specificity of those techniques, they still have limitations such as the complicated detection process, high technical difficulty, and the need for multiple measurements. Research on molecular biomarkers of ionizing radiation injury is needed to achieve early and rapid diagnosis of casualties
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