A retrospective clinical study to explore diagnostically significant markers in circulating exosomes of patients with cerebral small vessels disease (CSVD)

Often characterized by insidious onset, CSVD is the leading cause of vascular dementia.Nonetheless, early screening and diagnosis of CSVD remain challenging. Exosomal miRNAs in circulation have been found to be diagnostic markers for many diseases and to play an essential role in neurological disorders. The research will use peripheral blood samples from CSVD patients hospitalized and relatively healthy outpatients in our neurology department from 2018 to 2020. Specifically, microarray results from patients with CSVD will be obtained and then validated in peripheral blood samples, aiming to investigate abnormal expression indicators in circulating exosomes of patients with CSVD, for further mechanism exploration and diagnosis of CSVD. To obtain a general profile of differential miRNAs from the plasm exosomes of CSVD patients, 16 CSVD patients and 16 controls were chosen randomly to create 4 CSVD pools and 4 control pools (each pool contained 4 serum samples). Differential expression of miRNAs between CSVD and control cohorts was examined by using miRNA microarray: Affymetrix GeneChip miRNA 4.0 Array. Raw data was normalized using RMA algorithm (affy package). Differential expression analysis of microarray data was performed with the limma package. The Shanghai GeneChem company (GeneChem, China) performed hybridization, scanning, and data analysis of the microarrays.