Identification of dysregulated microRNAs involved in arachidonic acid metabolism regulation in dilated cardiomyopathy-mediated heart failure patients.

Heart failure (HF), a clinical syndrome with high morbidity and mortality, is becoming a growing public health problem. Dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) is one of the major causes of HF, yet the molecular mechanisms underlying DCM-mediated HF are not completely understood. Previous studies have shown that dysregulation of arachidonic acid (AA) metabolism could contribute to the development of HF. To explore the roles of microRNAs (miRNAs) in regulating AA metabolism in HF, we used two public datasets to analyze the expression changes of miRNAs in the patients of DCM-mediated HF. A total of 101 and 88 miRNAs with significant abundance alterations in the two dataset were obtained, respectively. Around 1/3 of these miRNAs were predicted to target AA metabolic pathway genes. We also investigated the distribution of known single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) within the sequences of miRNAs dysregulated in DCM-mediated HF patients, and identified miRNAs harboring high number of SNPs in either the seed regions or the entire sequences. These information could provide clues for further functional studies of miRNAs in the pathogeny of DCM-mediated HF.