Study of Peripheral Blood Non-coding RNAs as Diagnosis and Prognosis Biomarker for Acute Pancreatitis

Acute pancreatitis is a sudden inflammation of the pancreas. It can have severe complications and high mortality despite treatment. While mild cases are often successfully treated with conservative measures, such as fasting and aggressive intravenous fluid rehydration, severe cases may require admission to the intensive care unit or even surgery to deal with complications of the disease process. The diagnosis of severe acute pancreatitis at an early phase remain a major challenge for clinicians.

Therefore, many biologic markers have been studied in an effort to improve the diagnostic rate and determine the severity of acute pancreatitis but with disappointing results. Non-coding RNAs, including microRNAs and long noncoding RNA (lncRNA), have recently been validated to stably exist in peripheral blood. Several publications showed that it may serve as potential markers for various diseases, including cancer and inflammation. Our current study evaluated whether and which kind of non-coding RNAs could serve as good markers for severe acute pancreatitis.