Related Experiment Video
Updated: Oct 9, 2026
Estimating Bilateral Atrial Function by Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance Feature Tracking in Patients with Paroxysmal Atrial Fibrillation
Published on: July 20, 2022
Preliminary exploration of differentially expressed circular RNAs for discriminating atrial fibrillation-related
Zhong-Bao Ruan1, Fei Wang1, Shu-Yi Cong2
1Department of Cardiology, the Affiliated Taizhou People's Hospital of Nanjing Medical University, Taizhou School of Clinical Medicine, Nanjing Medical University, Taizhou, China.
Background:
Few studies have investigated the detection of circular RNAs (circRNAs) in peripheral blood to discriminate stroke risk in atrial fibrillation (AF). The aim of this study is to identify differentially expressed circRNAs in AF-related stroke in peripheral blood and provide a possible new biomarker for discriminating AF-related stroke.
Methods:
A total of 23 patients with AF-related stroke and 23 AF patients hospitalized at Taizhou People's Hospital between August 2020 and December 2020 were enrolled in the study. Peripheral blood samples from three AF-related stroke patients and three AF patients were randomly selected for bioinformatics analysis based on whole-transcriptome sequencing technology. Quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR) was used to validate the microarray hybridization results in the remaining 20 AF-related stroke patients and 20 AF patients. CircRNA-miRNA networks were constructed using Cytoscape 3.4.0 (http://cytoscape.org/). The discriminative effect of differentially expressed circRNAs on AF-related stroke was explored using ROC curves.
Results:
A total of 15 circRNAs were identified as differentially expressed between AF-related stroke patients and AF patients, comprising 8 upregulated and 7 downregulated circRNAs. Differentially expressed circRNA-related signaling pathways were mainly involved in signal transduction, infectious diseases, and immune system processes. circRNA_08148, circRNA_12852, and circRNA_00199 emerged as the top three circRNAs with the highest number of binding nodes in the circRNA-miRNA networks. qRT-PCR validation confirmed significant differential expression for three upregulated circRNAs (p < 0.05 or p < 0.01 for circRNA_00199, circRNA_06049, and circRNA_12852) and two of the three downregulated circRNAs (p < 0.05 or p < 0.01 for circRNA_11414 and circRNA_09151). circRNA_12852 was identified as an independent risk factor for stroke in AF patients after adjusting for the D-dimer level and neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (odds ratio (OR): 1.80, 95% CI: 1.150-2.817, p-value: 0.01). High expression of circRNA_12852 demonstrated some discriminative value for AF-related stroke (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC): 0.810, 95% CI: 0.662-0.958, p-value: 0.0008).
Conclusions:
Compared with AF patients, those with AF- related stroke exhibited differentially expressed circRNAs. circRNA_08148, circRNA_12852, and circRNA_00199 emerged as the top three circRNAs with the highest number of binding nodes within the co-expression network. circRNA_12852 was identified as an independent risk factor for discriminating AF-related stroke.