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MicroRNAs Associated With Incident Diabetes in the Diabetes Prevention Program

Flowers E, Aouizerat BE, Kanaya AM, Florez JC, Gong X, Zhang L

The Journal of clinical endocrinology and metabolism, 2023

1,000 participants

Abstract

CONTEXT: MicroRNAs (miRs) are short (ie, 18-26 nucleotide) regulatory elements of messenger RNA translation to amino acids.

OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study was to assess whether miRs are predictive of incident type 2 diabetes (T2D) in the Diabetes Prevention Program (DPP) trial.

METHODS: This was a secondary analysis (n = 1000) of a subset of the DPP cohort that leveraged banked biospecimens to measure miRs. We used random survival forest and Lasso methods to identify the optimal miR predictors and the Cox proportional hazards to model time to T2D overall and within intervention arms.

RESULTS: We identified 5 miRs (miR-144, miR-186, miR-203a, miR-205, miR-206) that constituted the optimal predictors of incident T2D after adjustment for covariates (hazard ratio [HR] 2.81, 95% CI 2.05, 3.87; P < .001). Predictive risk scores following cross-validation showed the HR for the highest quartile risk group compared with the lowest quartile risk group was 5.91 (95% CI 2.02, 17.3; P < .001). There was significant interaction between the intensive lifestyle (HR 3.60, 95% CI 2.50, 5.18; P < .001) and the metformin (HR 2.72; 95% CI 1.47, 5.00; P = .001) groups compared with placebo. Of the 5 miRs identified, 1 targets a gene with prior known associations with risk for T2D.

CONCLUSION: We identified 5 miRs that are optimal predictors of incident T2D in the DPP cohort. Future directions include validation of this finding in an independent sample in order to determine whether this risk…

How strong is the evidence?

Evidence Hub reads this as a cohort study, done in people. Its evidence level is 3 of 5 (Moderate · trial / cohort / secondary analysis). Trials without a large randomized design, cohorts and secondary analyses give moderate evidence. Reported size: 1,000 participants or records.

How the five levels of evidence work. The level is assigned automatically from the abstract and can be wrong, so check the paper.

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