Circulating Long Intergenic Non-Coding RNA LINC01538 as Potential Novel Biomarker for Acute Myocardial Infarction: Prospective Cohort Study

Abstract

Objective: Non-coding RNAs are the RNAs with no protein coding function, long non-coding RNAs (LncRNAs) are the non-coding RNAs with more than 200 nucleotides. During the journey of discovering novel biomarkers for diagnosis of myocardial infarction (MI), the principle of studying the LncRNA as a potential would be always attractive, as it needs easy sample collection, has high detection sensitivity and high myocardial tissue specificity. Our main objective was to investigate the potential of LINC01538 as a novel diagnostic biomarker for MI. Material and Methods: Quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR) was used to assess the expression of the serum LINC01538 in 50 ST Elevation MI (STEMI) patients and 48 controls. Results: The study showed a significant increase in serum level expression of LINC01538 in MI patients compared to controls [12 (6.6-21.8) vs. 0.07 (0.01-0.2), p<0.001]. LINC01538 expression level in MI group was positively correlated with creatine kinase MB and high sensitive cardiac troponin I (hs-cTnI) (r=0.39, p=0.006 and r=0.22, p=0.007, respectively). Hs-cTnI found to have diagnostic value for MI with an area under curve (AUC) 0.917 [95% confidence interval (CI): 0.855-0.979, p<0.001] at an optimal cutoff point of 1.45 ng/L, 90% sensitivity and 91% specificity. However, LINC01538 showed the highest diagnostic value with an AUC 0.980 (95% CI: 0.942- 1, p<0.001) at an optimal cut-off point of 1.76, 100% sensitivity and 98% specificity. Conclusion: Our findings have, for the first time, demonstrated that circulating LINC01538 are highly expressed in patients with MI, functioning as potential novel biomarker for diagnosis.