Background:
Psychological resilience is the process of effectively adapting to stressful events or managing significant sources of stress and is associated with schizophrenia (SZ). Extracellular vesicle microRNAs (EV miRNAs) can influence gene expression in distal target tissues and play a key role in intercellular communication. Therefore, we aimed to used aberrant miRNAs-targeted genes of psychological resilience for evaluating the predictive ability of the model to discriminate schizophrenia.

Methods:
We recruited 30 SZ patients and 15 healthy controls (HC) in the study. A genome-wide profiling of EV miRNAs was performed to detect the aberrant miRNA expressions between low and high resilience individuals. Next, we conducted enrichment analysis based on the miRNAs to combine psychological resilience, neurological and mental-related filtering conditions to detect the candidate genes. We used the resilience-related genes to distinguish SZ and HC and evaluated predictive ability of the model for SZ using ROC curve analysis.

Results:
In the genome-wide EV miRNAs and enrichment analyses, we discovered four EV miRNAs-targeted genes associated with resilience (c-Myc, AKT3, NLRP3 and ROCK1). Through gene function analysis, the finding showed that ROCK1 was related to regulating vascular oxidation and stress response. In the results of ROCK1 expression, there was a significant difference between SZ and HC (p < 0.05). In the ROC curve analysis, ROCK1 gene had good discrimination ability between SZ and HC (accuracy=0.76, sensitivity=0.73, and specificity=0.80). Conclusions: Our findings suggest that EV miRNA-targeted gene of psychological resilience can be utilized to identify schizophrenia and may contribute to early prevention and intervention.

Authors:
Sheng-Hsiang Lin, National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan
Bao-Yu Chen, National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan
Chia-Hsuan Li, National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan
Cheng-Ta Yang, National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan
Yun-Hsuan Chang, National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan
Shulan Hsieh, National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan

About the Presenter(s)
Dr. Sheng-Hsiang Lin is currently a Professor of Institute of Clinical Medicine, College of Medicine, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan. He specialized in psychiatric and genetic epidemiology.

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