Hsa-miR-19b-3p and Hsa-miR-23b-3P are the candidate biomarkers for bipolar disorder

Bipolar disorder (BD) is a severe psychiatric disorder and among the leading causes of disability worldwide that has a significant genetic component with high heritability. The prognosis for BD patients remains poor because of the lack of reliable biomarkers and also pathogenesis and diagnostic methods remain limited. The purpose of this study was the elucidation potential candidate hub miRNAs related to BD. We searched the gene and miRNA expression patterns of BD from five expression arrays (GSE74358, GSE69486, GSE12654, GSE46416 for gene expression, and GSE152267 for miRNA expression) from the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) database to recognize differentially expressed genes (DEGs) and differentially expressed miRNAs (DEMs) between normal and BD samples. Using limma package, 87 DEGs were identified and Enrichment analysis for identified genes was performed. Due to more validation of DEGs, their expression was evaluated by 8 independent expression arrays including GSE12649, GSE23848, GSE39653, GSE46449, GSE5388, GSE5389, GSE53987, and GSE62191. By merging DEMs and DEGs, miRNA-mRNA network was constructed. After elucidation of hub miRNAs, the ability of detected miRNAs to discriminate BD from healthy controls was assessed by area under the curve (AUC) using the ROC curve analysis. Furthermore, RT-qPCR on 50 BD samples and 50 healthy controls was performed to validate the in silico results. Our results showed that hsa-miR-19b-3p and hsa-miR-23b-3P could be potential biomarkers of BD.