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Updated: Jan 30, 2026

Tear-Derived Exosomal miR-15a as New Diagnostic Tool for Diabetic Retinopathy
Published on: December 30, 2025
Mitochondrial haplogroups are not associated with diabetic retinopathy in a large Australian and British Caucasian
Ebony Liu1, Georgia Kaidonis2, Mark C Gillies3
1Department of Ophthalmology, Flinders University, Flinders Medical Centre, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia. ebony.liu@flinders.edu.au.
Abstract:
Mitochondrial haplogroups H1, H2 and UK have previously been reported to be associated with proliferative diabetic retinopathy (PDR) in Caucasian patients with diabetes. We aimed to replicate this finding with a larger sample and expand the analysis to include different severities of DR, and diabetic macular edema (DME). Caucasian participants (n = 2935) with either type 1 or type 2 diabetes from the Australian Registry of Advanced Diabetic Retinopathy were enrolled in this study. Twenty-two mitochondrial single nucleotide polymorphisms were genotyped by MassArray and haplogroups reconstructed using Haplogrep. Chi square tests and logistic regressions were used to test associations between haplogroup and DR phenotypes including any DR, non-proliferative DR (NPDR), proliferative DR (PDR) and DME. After stratifying the samples in type 1 and type 2 diabetes groups, and adjusting for sex, age, diabetes duration, concurrent HbA1c and hypertension, neither haplogroups H1, H2, UK, K or JT were associated with any DR, NPDR, PDR or DME.
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