Circulating Plasma MicroRNA Expression in Early-onset and Late-onset Coronary Artery Disease Patients

The prevalence of coronary artery disease (CAD) is increasing among young adults. To improve CAD diagnosis, microRNAs are being explored as potential minimally invasive biomarkers. This dataset contains processed and analysis-ready data from a study of circulating plasma microRNAs (miRNAs) in patients with early-onset and late-onset coronary artery disease (CAD) and controls (29 controls, 80 early-onset CAD, 28 late-onset CAD). EDTA plasma samples were collected prior to coronary angiography, total RNA enriched for small RNAs was isolated, and small RNA libraries were prepared and sequenced on an Illumina platform; primary preprocessing included quality control (FastQC), adapter trimming and miRNA quantification with miRDeep2, alignment to the GRCh38.p13 reference genome with Bowtie, and annotation against miRBase v22.1, followed by filtering of lowly expressed miRNAs, batch-effect correction with ComBat-seq, TMM normalisation, and differential expression analysis with limma and empirical Bayes moderation.
The deposited data include a batch-corrected, TMM-normalised and log₂-transformed expression matrix for 287 circulating miRNAs, group-level clinical summary tables, differential expression results for all three main group comparisons (early-onset CAD vs control, late-onset CAD vs control, early-onset vs late-onset CAD), correlation analyses between miRNAs and clinical variables, feature-selection and predictive modelling outputs (LASSO / glmnet and randomForest with cross-validation and ROC-based evaluation), and functional/pathway enrichment results (GO and KEGG) for predicted targets of the final 7-miRNA biomarker panel (hsa-miR-10b-5p, hsa-miR-451a, hsa-miR-142-5p, hsa-miR-29c-3p, hsa-miR-320b, hsa-miR-486-3p, and hsa-miR-625-3p).