Molecular miR-19a in Acute Myocardial Infarction: Novel Potential Indicators of Prognosis and Early Diagnosis

Due to the increasing annual incidence rate of disability and mortality in patients with acute myocardial infarction (AMI), the need for an appropriate diagnostic tool has become a crucial urgent issue. An increase in biomarkers and protein levels in response to AMI can be used as a predictive biomarker with different sensitivities and specificities. This study aimed at investigating the role of miR-19a as a biomarker with acceptable sensitivity and specificity for early diagnosis of AMI.

We studied 175 patients with AMI admitted within 12 h of symptom onset and 90 healthy subjects as control group. Patients were divided into two groups, including group I (normal vessels and no significant artery stenosis) and primary percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) group II (patients with more than 50% stenosis in vessels and severe atherosclerosis) diagnosed by angiography. The expression level of miR-19a was evaluated by the real-time polymerase chain reaction and other serum chemistries were also analyzed.

The results demonstrated that circulating miR-19a levels were significantly increased in patient groups compared to the control group (2.88 ± 1.06 vs. 5.93 ± 1.28, P<0.0001). We also found that miR-19a levels were higher in group II (134.62-fold) than group I (15.42-fold). The upper levels of miR-19a were significantly correlated with the increased serum levels of CK-MB (ρ=0.29, P<0.0001), CTn I (ρ=0.4, P<0.0001) and creatinine (ρ=0.27, P<0.0001). In addition, Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) analysis revealed that circulating miR-19a had considerable diagnostic accuracy for the patients with normal vessel with an AUC of 0.930 (95% CI: 0.697-0.765) and for PCI patients with an AUC of 0.966 (95% CI: 0.748-0.784).

Circulating miR-19a possibly has prognostic value to be used as a promising molecular target for early diagnosis and prognosis of AMI.