Abstract
Overweight and obesity are major problems in today’s society, driving the prevalence of diabetes and its related complications. It is important to understand the molecular mechanisms underlying the chronic complications in diabetes in order to develop better therapeutic approaches for these conditions. Some of the most important complications include macrovascular abnormalities, e.g., heart disease and atherosclerosis, and microvascular abnormalities, e.g., retinopathy, nephropathy and neuropathy, in particular diabetic foot ulceration. The highly conserved endogenous small non-coding RNA molecules, the micro RNAs (miRNAs) have in recent years been found to be involved in a number of biological processes, including the pathogenesis of disease. Their main function is to regulate post-transcriptional gene expression by binding to their target messenger RNAs (mRNAs), leading to mRNA degradation, suppression of translation or even gene activation. These molecules are promising therapeutic targets and demonstrate great potential as diagnostic biomarkers for disease. This review aims to describe the most recent findings regarding the important roles of miRNAs in diabetes and its complications, with special attention given to the different phases of diabetic wound healing.
Highlights
Overweight and obesity are major problems in today’s society, driving the prevalence of diabetes and its related complications
This review summarizes first the most recent findings regarding the important role of micro RNAs (miRNAs) in the general pathology of diabetic complications, focusing toward the end, on the less studied, diabetic skin wound healing
Platelets play an important role in atherosclerosis and platelet-released miR-223 working via the insulin-like growth factor (IGF)-1 receptor can promote vascular endothelial cell (VEC) apoptosis induced by advanced glycation end products (AGE) [61]
Summary
The prevalence of diabetes, a chronic metabolic disorder, has been increasing at alarming rates all over the world and is estimated to rise to 552 million adults by 2030 [1,2]. It has been suggested that the main reason these large studies have not been able to show any major impact on lowering the risk for diabetic complications, is that the interventions are implemented too late after the diagnosis of the disease This is supported by the UKPDS and STENO-2 studies, where treatment of chronic hyperglycemia was undertaken at the early stages of the disease [17,18]. When the tight miRNA regulation is altered it can lead to serious physiological abnormalities, including chronic diseases, such as diabetes and its complications [19,20,21,22] Their main function is to regulate post-transcriptional gene expression by binding to their target messenger RNAs (mRNAs), leading to mRNA degradation or suppression of translation [19,20,21]. This review summarizes first the most recent findings regarding the important role of miRNA in the general pathology of diabetic complications, focusing toward the end, on the less studied, diabetic skin wound healing
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