Role of serum MicroRNA-499 as a diagnostic marker in acute myocardial infarction (AMI)

Abstract

Acute myocardial infraction is one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality in developing countries such as India and even worldwide. Its etiology is complicated because of several confounding factors involved in its pathogenesis. Recently, MicroRNA has been recognized to play an important role in predicting the diagnosis and prognosis of myocardial infarction. MiR-499 plays a pivotal role in the recovery of cardiac cell, following injury. Since several studies have profiled several miRs in cardiovascular diseases and of which miR-499 is mainly expressed in the myocardium. Our study is primarily designed to explore the diagnostic role of miR-499 in AMI. The study included 60 AMI patients aged 30–60 years and an equal number of age and gender matched controls. All cases were taken from Mahatma Gandhi Medical College and Research Institute a tertiary healthcare setup and analyzed for miR-499 by RT-PCR, lipid profile, CK (NAC), CK-MB and high sensitivity cardiac Troponin T were analyzed by IFCC approved methods. Unpaired Student's test was performed to compare the mean of the cases with the controls. Pearson correlation was used to study the association of miR with conventional markers. Receiver Operating Characteristic curve was plotted to find out the sensitivity and specificity of miR-499 in AMI. Our study showed significantly high levels of miR499 in AMI patients in comparison to the healthy controls (p=0.012). MiR-499 levels positively correlated with hs-cnTn T (r=0.582, p<0.01) and CK-MB (r=0.443, p<0.01). ROC for miR-499 showed an AUC 0.974 with 93.33% sensitivity and 86.67% specificity which was comparatively higher than the current markers CK-MB (86.67% and 71.67) and hs-cnTn T (90.00% and 81.56%). When these biomarkers analyzed for combined sensitivity increases but the specificity decreases. The results showed that miR-499 has a significant correlation and also had higher sensitivity and specificity when compared to other conventional markers and thus it could serve as a better early diagnostic marker of AMI.