Emerging evidence on noncoding-RNA regulatory machinery in intervertebral disc degeneration: a narrative review

Intervertebral disc degeneration (IDD) is the most common cause of low-back pain. Accumulating evidence indicates that the expression profiling of noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs), including microRNAs (miRNAs), circular RNAs (circRNAs), and long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs), are different between intervertebral disc tissues obtained from healthy individuals and patients with IDD. However, the roles of ncRNAs in IDD are still unclear until now. In this review, we summarize the studies concerning ncRNA interactions and regulatory functions in IDD. Apoptosis, aberrant proliferation, extracellular matrix degradation, and inflammatory abnormality are tetrad fundamental pathologic phenotypes in IDD. We demonstrated that ncRNAs are playing vital roles in apoptosis, proliferation, ECM degeneration, and inflammation process of IDD. The ncRNAs participate in underlying mechanisms of IDD in different ways. MiRNAs downregulate target genes’ expression by directly binding to the 3′-untranslated region of mRNAs. CircRNAs and lncRNAs act as sponges or competing endogenous RNAs by competitively binding to miRNAs and regulating the expression of mRNAs. The lncRNAs, circRNAs, miRNAs, and mRNAs widely crosstalk and form complex regulatory networks in the degenerative processes. The current review presents novel insights into the pathogenesis of IDD and potentially sheds light on the therapeutics in the future.