Obstructive Sleep Apnea: A Look towards Micro-RNAs as Biomarkers of the Future

SIMPLE SUMMARY: Intermittent hypoxia associated with obstructive sleep apnea is often associated with cardiac, metabolic, and neoplastic alterations. A large number of studies in recent years have demonstrated that microRNAs play an essential role in the pathogenesis of obstructive sleep apnea and offer considerable potential as a critical new target for the diagnosis and management of patients with this disease. In this review, we highlight the different roles of microRNAs in obstructive sleep apnea and identify their regulatory roles in disease development and progression. ABSTRACT: Sleep-disordered breathing (SDB) includes a broad spectrum of diseases, of which obstructive sleep apnea syndrome (OSA) is the most clinically significant manifestation. OSA is a respiratory disorder characterized by episodes of complete or partial obstruction of the upper airways that disturb ventilation and sleep architecture. In recent years, interest in the clinical implications of OSA seems to have increased, probably due to the numerous studies that have shown the existence of an important correlation between OSA and cardiovascular, dysmetabolic, and neoplastic changes. The guidelines currently available highlight the importance of diagnosis and effective treatment for OSA, underlining the need for new biomarkers that are useful in clinical practice, feasible, and reproducible to guide medical decision making. In this review, we intend to provide an overview of the potential role of microRNAs as new indicators for OSA management. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small non-coding RNA molecules that play an important role in RNA silencing and regulation of gene expression at the post-transcriptional level. These can bind specifically to their target genes by forming silencing complexes, thus inducing degradation or altered gene expression. A wide range of miRNAs have been extensively studied in a variety of diseases including cancer, and recently, miRNAs have been shown to have enormous potential to function as diagnostic and clinical biomarkers of disease. This review includes recent studies that establish the inevitable role of miRNAs in the pathogenesis of OSA.