Circulating micro-RNA diagnoses NASH in patients with NAFLD

Combined serum circulating micro-RNA served as a novel biomarker for the diagnosis of nonalcoholic steatohepatitis in patients with nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, according to research published in Nature Scientific Reports.

“Developing noninvasive tools for evaluating NAFLD severity is an emerging interest of hepatologists, especially for the discrimination of NASH or advanced fibrosis among NAFLD. ... For noninvasive diagnosis of NASH, several serologic markers were investigated, but the diagnostic accuracy of those markers was limited,” Tae Hyung Kim, Korea University College of Medicine, and colleagues wrote. “Circulating micro-RNAs (miRNAs) have been studied as a candidate for diagnosis of a variety of diseases such as malignancy and cardiovascular, neurologic and metabolic diseases including diabetes and NAFLD.”

To develop a diagnostic biomarker for NASH, researchers analyzed the circulating miRNA (n = 2,588) expression profile in sera from 24 patients with NAFLD using next generation sequencing; they further compared expression profiles to distinguish NASH (12 patients) from nonalcoholic fatty liver (NAFL). Of 26 miRNAs that were increased in the NASH group compared with the NAFL group, eight miRNAs underwent silico analysis. The combination of four miRNAs showed significant area under the curve values and accurately diagnosed NASH among study patients (AUC = 0.875; 95% CI, 0.676-0.973). An external validation cohort of 37 patients with NAFLD confirmed diagnostic accuracy (AUC = 0.874; 95% CI, 0.724-0.96).

“NASH represents significant distinct miRNA expression profiles compared with NAFL,” Kim and colleagues concluded. “A combination of serum circulating miRNAs including miR-21-5p, miR-151a-3p, miR-192-5p and miR-4449 could be used as a novel biomarker for the diagnosis of NASH in NAFLD.”