Aging
Navigate
Submit an Article
Research Paper|Volume 9, Issue 3|pp 900—913

Circulating MiRNAs as biomarkers of gait speed responses to aerobic exercise training in obese older adults

Tan Zhang1, Tina E. Brinkley1, Keqin Liu2, Xin Feng3, Anthony P. Marsh4, Stephen Kritchevsky1, Xiaobo Zhou2, Barbara J. Nicklas1
  • 1Department of Internal Medicine, Section on Gerontology and Geriatric Medicine, Sticht Center for Healthy Aging and Alzheimer's Prevention, Wake Forest School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, NC 27157, USA
  • 2Center for Bioinformatics and Systems Biology, Department of Radiology, Wake Forest School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, NC 27157, USA
  • 3Department of Otolaryngology, Wake Forest School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, NC 27157, USA
  • 4Department of Health and Exercise Science, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC 27109, USA
Received: December 14, 2016Accepted: March 3, 2017Published: March 15, 2017
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.101199

Copyright: © 2017 Zhang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Gait speed is a useful predictor of adverse outcomes, including incident mobility disability and mortality in older adults. While aerobic exercise training (AEX) is generally an effective therapy to improve gait speed, individual responses are highly variable. Circulating microRNAs (miRNAs) may contribute to inter-individual changes in gait speed with AEX. We examined whether plasma miRNAs are associated with gait speed changes (dGaitSp) in 33 obese older adults (age: 69.3±3.6 years, BMI: 34.0±3.1 kg/m2, 85% white, 73% women) who performed treadmill walking, 4 days/week for 5 months. Gait speed (baseline: 1.02±0.19 m/s; range of response: -0.2 to 0.35 m/s) was assessed using a 400 meter-fast-paced walk test. Using Nanostring technology, 120 out of 800 miRNAs were found to be abundantly expressed in plasma and 4 of these were significantly changed after AEX: miR-376a-5p increased, while miR-16-5p, miR-27a-3p, and miR-28-3p all decreased. In addition, baseline miR-181a-5p levels (r=-0.40, p=0.02) and percent changes in miR-92a-3p (r=-0.44, p=0.009) associated negatively with dGaitSp. Linear regression combined baseline miR-181a-5p and miR-92a-3p levels showed even stronger associations with dGaitSp (r=-0.48, p=0.005). These results suggest that circulating miR-181a-5p and miR-92a-3p may predict and/or regulate AEX-induced gait speed changes in obese older adults.