Good day, everyone! Here’s a cool and very interesting article that I found about microRNAs aka our new hope for early disease detection and even better health care!

Our health is our most important and expensive asset. Even the mildest inconveniences concerning our health can ripple into a snowball effect into our lives. Especially nowadays with the pandemic going on and with the lot of the population sick with more and more diseases, our health should be at the top of our list of concerns.

However, our approach to health has always been quite retroactive. We only tend to go to the doctor once we have experienced symptoms, which sometimes leads to us not realizing that it is already too late.

With this study entitled “Advances in quantifying circulatory microRNA for early disease detection” however, we may be able to finally be more proactive with regards to our health before one of us falls victim to the whims of post-symptom medical checkup.

They talked about how breakthroughs in medical technology, molecular diagnostics, and multi-omics analyses led to improvements in illness prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring in this study. This is referred to as “precision preventive healthcare,” which attempts to improve patient health by combining preventative measures with early disease identification for precision medicine intervention.

With precision preventive healthcare, survival rates for cancer have significantly increased when the tumor is discovered at the early stages, when curative treatment is still possible.

MiRNAs are one of the analytes that current research is most excited about. These are 22-nucleotide noncoding RNAs that regulate gene expression by binding to target mRNAs’ 3′ untranslated region. Because they are contained in extracellular vesicles or exosomes or otherwise attached to proteins or lipids, they are actively secreted into the circulation by cells and demonstrate exceptional stability in biofluids. Because of these characteristics, circulatory miRNAs are excellent as liquid biopsy biomarkers because dynamic changes in their expression can be monitored over time to detect illness development and progression.

Despite this discovery and all these advancements however, the clinical use of circulatory miRNAs are yet to take the medical world by storm as many barriers still stand its way. This includes key barriers in the poor reproducibility of clinical biomarker discovery and validation studies. This means that even with these discoveries, if people are not made aware of them, it will still prove to be futile because people do not trust it enough because of the lack of attention placed over it.

Another great barrier to precision preventive healthcare with miRNAs are the limited number of accredited clinical labs due to requirements for technical competency and regulatory approval.

With these gaps already established, we can only hope that they will be addressed as earlier as possible so that we, as a population, can finally reap its benefits and experience life without having to worry about our sickness or being sick.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0958166921002408