Dato Serena, Crocco Paolina, Iannone Francesca, Passarino Giuseppe, Rose Giuseppina
Department of Biology, Ecology and Earth Sciences, University of Calabria, 87036 Rende, Italy.
Biology (Basel). 2022 Jul 31;11(8):1151. doi: 10.3390/biology11081151.
The past years have seen an increasing concern about frailty, owing to the growing number of elderly people and the major impact of this syndrome on health and social care. The identification of frail people passes through the use of different tests and biomarkers, whose concerted analysis helps to stratify the populations of patients according to their risk profile. However, their efficiency in prognosis and their capability to reflect the multisystemic impairment of frailty is discussed. Recent works propose the use of miRNAs as biological hallmarks of physiological impairment in different organismal districts. Changes in miRNAs expression have been described in biological processes associated with phenotypic outcomes of frailty, opening intriguing possibilities for their use as biomarkers of fragility. Here, with the aim of finding reliable biomarkers of frailty, while considering its complex nature, we revised the current literature on the field, for uncovering miRNAs shared across physical and cognitive frailty domains. By applying in silico analyses, we retrieved the top-ranked shared miRNAs and their targets, finally prioritizing the most significant ones. From this analysis, ten miRNAs emerged which converge into two main biological processes: inflammation and energy homeostasis. Such markers, if validated, may offer promising capabilities for early diagnosis of frailty in the elderly population.
由于老年人数量不断增加以及该综合征对健康和社会护理的重大影响，过去几年人们对衰弱的关注日益增加。衰弱人群的识别通过使用不同的测试和生物标志物来进行，这些测试和生物标志物的协同分析有助于根据患者的风险状况对患者群体进行分层。然而，人们对它们在预后方面的效率及其反映衰弱多系统损害的能力进行了讨论。最近的研究提出将 microRNA（miRNA）用作不同机体区域生理损伤的生物学标志。在与衰弱表型结果相关的生物学过程中已描述了 miRNA 表达的变化，这为将其用作脆弱性生物标志物开辟了有趣的可能性。在此，为了找到可靠的衰弱生物标志物，同时考虑到其复杂性质，我们查阅了该领域的现有文献，以发现身体和认知衰弱领域共有的 miRNA。通过进行计算机分析，我们检索到排名靠前的共享 miRNA 及其靶标，最终确定了最显著的那些。通过该分析，出现了十种 miRNA，它们汇聚成两个主要生物学过程：炎症和能量稳态。这些标志物如果得到验证，可能为老年人群衰弱的早期诊断提供有前景的能力。
