miRNAs in non-alcoholic fatty liver disease

Abstract

Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is a major cause of liver cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma and is a considerable threat to public health. miRNAs are important post-transcriptional regulators of gene expression, and the dysregulation of miRNAs is involved in various biological processes in the liver, including lipid homeostasis, inflammation, apoptosis, and cell proliferation. Recently, a number of studies have described the association between miRNAs and NAFLD progression and have shown that circulating miRNAs reflect histological changes in the liver. Therefore, circulating miRNAs have potential use for the evaluation of NAFLD severity. In this review, we discuss the involvement of miRNAs in NAFLD pathogenesis and the key role of miRNAs in the screening, diagnosis, and staging of NAFLD.

Keywords

nonalcoholic fatty liver disease / nonalcoholic steatohepatitis / hepatocellular carcinoma / miRNA

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the grant from National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 81322010).

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Zhen He, Cheng Hu, and Weiping Jia declare that they have no conflict of interest. This manuscript is a review article and does not involve a research protocol that would require approval by the relevant institutional review board or ethics committee.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

2016 Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg