Low-Dose Exposure to Ionizing Radiation Deregulates the Brain-Specific MicroRNA-134 in Interventional Cardiologists

• cardiologists
• microRNAs
• radiation

Editorial, see p 2417

In recent years, there has been growing concern about the health risks for contemporary interventional cardiologists who have high and unprecedented levels of occupational ionizing radiation exposure.¹

MicroRNAs (miRNAs), a class of short and highly conserved noncoding RNA molecules (≈22 nucleotides), have been shown to become dysregulated in many human diseases.² The stability and tissue specificity of circulating miRNAs make them ideal biomarkers to explore the molecular mechanisms underlying the association between chronic low-dose radiation exposure and potential disease risk. The purpose of this study was to apply a miRNome-wide microarray to characterize the plasma miRNA profiles in interventional cardiologists professionally exposed to ionizing radiation.

The study consisted of 3 stages: discovery, selection, and validation. In the discovery stage, a microarray analysis (Agilent Human miRNA Microarray 8×60K Release 19.0 platform containing 2006 human miRNA probes) was performed on plasma from 10 interventional cardiologists (6 men; age, 54±5.4 years) and 10 age- and sex-matched unexposed control subjects (6 men; age, 53.2±5.5 years).

In the selection stage, all dysregulated miRNAs were evaluated in another 80 plasma samples (40 from interventional cardiologists and 40 from unexposed subjects) by quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction. …