Expression of MicroRNAs in Periodontal Disease: A Systematic Review

INTRODUCTION: Periodontal disease (PD) is a chronic inflammation of the soft tissues that support the structure of the tooth, and miRNAs are highly dynamic molecules that participate in the regulation of gene expression interfering with multiple genetic targets. The dysregulation of the expression of miRNAs has been associated with different types of pathologies; therefore, they are excellent molecules to be studied as biomarkers. Material and Methods. A search was made in the electronic databases of PubMed, Scopus, and Science Direct. The following key words were used: “microRNAs,” “miRNAs,” “periodontal disease,” “periodontitis,” and “biomarker”; employee independent search strategies with the Boolean operators “OR” and “AND”; a further search of the references of the selected studies was performed to detect potential studies that met the selection criteria. The data recollected from each article were author, country, year of publication, sample size, type of sample used to identify miRNAs, methodology used to identify miRNAs, type of periodontal disease, and miRNAs identified. RESULTS: Of the 13 selected studies, 6 used gingival tissue as a sample for the identification of miRNAs, 3 used gingival fluid, 2 used saliva, 1 used serum, and another used periodontal tissue. Chronic periodontitis was the most studied periodontal disease in 9 of the 13 selected articles; 7 used microarrays as the main technique for the identification of miRNAs. qRT-PCR was the assay choice to validate the identified miRNAs. CONCLUSION: The main type of periodontal disease on which most studies are focused is chronic periodontitis, with the main miRNAs being hsa-miR-146a, hsa-miR-146b, hsa-miR-155, and hsa-miR-200. This systematic review is one of the first to carry out an analysis of the current role of miRNAs in PD as biomarkers.