Expression profiles of microRNA molecules in different stages of chronic hepatitis B virus infection and its clinical significance / 中华传染病杂志

ABSTRACT

Objective To explore the expression profiles and their clinical significance of microRNA (miRNA) molecules in different stages of chronic hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection.Methods The miRNA molecule expressions of 12 patients with chronic hepatitis B,12 chronic HBV carriers,12 inactive hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg) carriers,and 9 healthy controls were screened using miRNA microarray.The miRNA profiles were validated by the real time fluorescence quantitative polymerase chain reaction (PCR).The t-test was used for comparison between twogroups,whereas one-way ANOVA and SNK-q tests were used for multiple comparisons.Mann-Whitney and Kruskal Wallis H tests were used for comparison of two or more groups of data with skewed distribution.The receiver operation characteristic (ROC) curve was constructed to evaluate the diagnostic significance of miRNA molecules.Results Compared with the healthy controls,significant differences in the expression profiles of miRNA molecules were found in peripheral blood mononuclear cells of chronic HBV carriers (2 molecules up-regulated,and 18 down regulated) and chronic hepatitis B patients (33 molecules up-regulated and 19 down-regulated).No significant difference was found between inactive HBsAg carriers (2 molecules up regulated,and 3 down-regulated) and controls.The results of six miRNA molecules detected by real-time fluorescence quantitative PCR were basically consistent with the results detected by microarray.The area under ROC curve of the six miRNA molecules of hsa miR-4711-3p,hsa-miR-3191 5p,hsa-miR-5704-5p,hsa-miR 548ah-5p,hsa-miR-146a-5p and hsa-miR-29b-3p in distinguishing immune tolerance and clearance of chronic HBV infection were 0.994,0.984,0.967,1.000,1.000 and 0.996,respectively.Conclusions The different expression profiles of miRNA molecules could be used to distinguish the different stages of chronic HBV infection,and are closely related with the immune tolerance and activation in chronic HBV infection.