Increased Circulating miR-155 identifies a subtype of preeclamptic patients

Preeclampsia is a heterogeneous disorder which affect maternal and fetal outcomes. The current classifications of preeclampsia such as “early-“ and “late-” types, and “mild” and “severe” forms, are too imprecise to delineate the pathophysiology of preeclampsia. Here we reported that roughly one third of preeclampsia patients had high expression of maternal serum miR-155 in the case-control study and longitudinal study. The maternal serum miR-155 increased as early as 11-13 +6 weeks of gestation. The patients with high serum miR-155 had severer clinical symptoms such as higher blood pressure and urine protein, and more adverse maternal and fetal outcomes. Moreover, these patients could be clustered as one group according to clinical manifestation by t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding analysis. Therefore, these data suggest that preeclamptic patients with high maternal serum miR-155 could be viewed as a subtype of preeclampsia.