Expression of miRNA-21 in edematous cortex tissues around contusions after traumatic brain injury and its correlation with prognosis

LIU Hua; WANG Wen-ming; YANG Jian; REN Guang-hui

Abstract：Objective To explore the expression of miRNA-21 in traumatic brain injury tissues and its cor-relation with prognosis.Methods The clinical characteristics of 122 patients[99 were male and 23 were female with an average age of (42.19 ±14.33) years(17-84 years)] who underwent surgery in our hospital from Dec. 2011 to Dec.2013 were retrospectively analyzed.Real-time PCR was used to detect the expression of miRNA-21.The patients were divided into two groups according to the relative expression of miRNA-21.Chi-square test was uti-lized to analyze the relationship between miRNA-21 expression and clinical features.Survival curves were plotted by using the Kaplan-Meier method and compared by the Log-rank test.A Cox proportional hazard regression model was applied to examine the joint effect of covariants.Results The expression of miRNA-21 was associated with progno-sis (χ2 =4.006,P=0.045).No statistical significance was observed between the expression of miRNA-21 and the clinical parameters,including age(χ2 =2.941,P =0.230),gender(χ2 =2.625,P =0.105),GCS at admission (χ2 =1.425,P=0.490),injury causes(χ2 =2.940,P=0.816) and traumatic brain injury type(χ2 =0.679,P=0.712 ) .Kaplan-Meier analysis showed that high expression of miRNA-21 was closely associated with a longer sur-vival time (χ2 =9.723,P=0.002).Both univariate and multivariate analyses demonstrated that miRNA-21 ex-pression might be a good prognostic marker of traumatic brain injury patients.Conclusion Our results indicate that high-regulation of miRNA-21 is associated with good prognosis of patients with traumatic brain injury and may provide some evidences for the prediction of the prognosis.