Evaluation of Circulating MicroRNAs in Schizophrenia: From Epigenomic Dysregulation to Potential Biomarkers

To evaluate the expression profile of circulating miRNAs in patients with schizophrenia (hsa-miR-34a, miR-449a, miR-564, miR-432, miR-548d, miR-572, and miR-652) in relation to individual negative controls for the disease. This was an analytical, case-controlled, cross-sectional study, using samples previously collected from patients diagnosed with schizophrenia (N = 650) and a control group (N = 924). Samples were analyzed after RNA extraction and quantification. After making a general comparison between the case and control groups, regardless of gender and other variables, all seven miRNAs showed statistically significant differences (p-value < 0.05). This also occurred in the variables gender, smoking, and alcoholism. Thus, the results indicated that depending on the clinical characteristics in the face of suspected schizophrenia, the miRNAs explored here seem to work as possible biomarkers, as they demonstrated, at various times, important differences between the studied groups.