Up-regulation of circular RNA hsa_circ_0037909 promotes essential hypertension

Essential hypertension (EH) is a high prevalence disease facing a public health challenge. People were little known about the genetics of diagnosing the cause of EH. Circular RNAs that have a continuous cycle of covalent closure, without affected by RNA exonuclease, and are more stable and hard to degrade may involve into the molecule regulation mechanism of EH as an important biomedical.

qRT-PCR was used to analyze circRNAs in total volume of human blood and the induced human aortic endothelial cells (HAECs) and human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs). Our case-control study was involved with 48 pairs of case controls with sex and age (±3 years) match. We conducted t test, Pearson's χ² test, and receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curve analysis for the corresponding analysis.

The expression level of hsa_circ_0037909 in EH patients was significantly higher than that in the healthy controls (P = 0.007), and the expression level of hsa-miR-637 in EH patients was significantly lower in than that in the healthy controls (P = 0.039); the same result appears in the HAECs and HUVECs. Hsa-miR-637 (adjusted P = 0.018), hsa_circ_0037909 (adjusted P = 0.005), HDL (adjusted P = 0.024), and serum creatinine (adjusted P = 0.014) were brought into the model which performed logistic regression analysis. The combination of two RNAs was excellent (P < 0.001) through ROC curve analysis. Hsa_circ_0037909 was significantly positively correlated with serum creatinine (P < 0.001) and low-density lipoprotein (LDL) (P = 0.017).

Our findings suggested that the combination of hsa_circ_0037911 and hsa-miR-637 may be a significant important biomarker for early diagnosis of EH. Hsa_circ_0037909 may affect serum creatinine or LDL leading to the formation of EH.