Bo Li,1,* Yan-Jun Du,2,* Feng Xu,3 Hong-Bing Li,4 Xu Yang1 

1Ophthalmology Center, Suining Central Hospital, Suining, People’s Republic of China; 2Department of Cardiovascular Medicine, Suining Third People’s Hospital, Suining, People’s Republic of China; 3Ultrasonography Department, Suining Central Hospital, Suining, People’s Republic of China; 4AIER Ophthalmology, Suining, People’s Republic of China

*These authors contributed equally to this work

Correspondence: Xu Yang, Email yangxu1_10@163.com

Purpose: To study the expression and diagnostic ability of the long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) MIAT, HOTTIP, and SNHG16 in serum of patients with diabetic retinopathy.
Methods: A total of 70 healthy controls and 195 patients with Type 2 Diabetes (T2D) were collected. T2D patients include 65 patients with Nondiabetic retinopathy (NDR), 65 patients with Nonproliferative diabetic retinopathy (NPDR) and 65 patients with Proliferative diabetic retinopathy (PDR). The relative expression of MIAT, HOTTIP and SNHG16 in participant serum was measured through Real-time fluorescence quantitative polymerase chain reaction to compare the differential expression between the groups. t test, Mann‒Whitney U-test, Pearson’s chi-square test and the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve were used to analyze the expression of these LncRNAs and their diagnostic ability for DR.
Results: We compare the healthy control group with T2D group, healthy control group with NDR group, NDR group with DR (NPDR+PDR) group, and NPDR group with PDR group. When NDR group was compared with the healthy control group, there was no difference between MIAT (p> 0.05)and HOTTIP (p> 0.05), only the relative expression of SNHG16(p< 0.05) was different and it’s ROC curve had identification significance. In the remaining inter-group comparisons, the differences in the expression of MIAT (p< 0.05), HOTTIP (p< 0.05) and SNHG16 (p< 0.05) were statistically significant, and their ROC curves were all had identification significance.
Conclusion: These findings prove that serum LncRNA MIAT, HOTTIP and SNHG16 may be used as potential markers to monitor the progress of DR.

Keywords: LncRNA MIAT, HOTTIP, SNHG16, diabetic retinopathy, type 2 diabetes