Papers of the Week

About 5% of the population suffers from fibromyalgia (FM), a chronic multi-symptom pain illness whose pathophysiology is still unknown. We aimed to be the first to investigate the possible association of sera levels of miR-217 and miR-532 in patients with fibromyalgia and correlate their expression levels to different clinical and biochemical disease criteria. This study included 80 participants who splitted into two groups: 40 fibromyalgia sufferers (12 male and 28 female), and 40 healthy volunteers (10 male and 30 female) who served as the control group. Venous blood samples were collected from all subjects. The miR-217 and miR-532 serum expressions were detected using quantitative real-time PCR (qRT-PCR). According to our data, the fold changes of miR-217 and miR-532 in fibromyalgia patients were significantly lower than in controls, for miR-217 (median = 0.1359, IQR: 0.038-0.287, P < 0.001) and miR-532 [median = 0.2199, IQR: (0.114-0.421), P < 0.001]. In addition, there was a significant negative relationship between Aspartate transaminase (AST) and both miR-217 and miR-532 (r = - 0.480, P = P < 0.001 r = - 0.462, P = P < 0.001), respectively. Serum miR-217 and miR-532 could serve as potential diagnostic biomarkers for fibromyalgia.