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Research Paper|Volume 12, Issue 13|pp 13518—13528

Association of the serum microRNA-29 family with cognitive impairment in Parkinson's disease

Linlin Han1, Yilin Tang1, Xiaochen Bai1, Xiaoniu Liang1, Yun Fan1, Yan Shen1, Fang Huang2, Jian Wang1
  • 1Department of Neurology and National Clinical Research Center for Aging and Medicine, Huashan Hospital, Fudan University, Shanghai 200040, China
  • 2State Key Laboratory of Medical Neurobiology and MOE Frontiers Center for Brain Science, Institutes of Brain Science, Fudan University, Shanghai 200032, China
* Equal contribution
Received: February 18, 2020Accepted: May 27, 2020Published: July 9, 2020
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.103458

Copyright © 2020 Han 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

We aimed to examine whether miRNA-29s (miR-29s) in serum are associated with cognitive impairment in Parkinson’s disease (PD). Thirty-nine PD patients with normal cognition (PD-NC), 37 PD patients with mild cognitive impairment (PD-MCI), 22 PD patients with dementia (PDD) and 40 healthy controls were recruited. Detailed clinical evaluations and a schedule of neuropsychological tests were administered to all patients. MiR-29s expression in serum samples was assessed using reverse-transcription quantitative real-time PCR. We found that the levels of all three miR-29s in the PDD group were significantly lower than those in the PD-NC group (p < 0.05). In addition, the miR-29b level was downregulated in the PD-MCI group with respect to that in the PD-NC group (p < 0.05). After adjusting for years of education and the UPDRS-III subscore using a multivariate model, miR-29s showed significant associations with PDD. MiR-29b levels were shown to be associated with different subsets of PD cognition and could accurately discriminate PDD from non-PDD (area under the curve (AUC) = 0.859; 95% CI, 0.7817-0.9372). Further analysis of the cognitive domains found that the miR-29s levels were all associated with memory performance in PD patients. In summary, miR-29s are associated with cognitive impairment in PD.