Bayesian multilevel model of micro RNA levels in ovarian-cancer and healthy subjects

PLoS One. 2019 Aug 29;14(8):e0221764. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0221764. eCollection 2019.

Abstract

In transcriptomics, micro RNAs (miRNAs) has gained much interest especially as potential disease indicators. However, apart from holding a great promise related to their clinical application, a lot of inconsistent results have been published. Our aim was to compare the miRNA expression levels in ovarian cancer and healthy subjects using the Bayesian multilevel model and to assess their potential usefulness in diagnosis. We have analyzed a case-control observational data on expression profiling of 49 preselected miRNA-based ovarian cancer indicators in 119 controls and 59 patients. A Bayesian multilevel model was used to characterize the effect of disease on miRNA levels controlling for differences in age and body weight. The difference between the miRNA level and health status of the patient on the scale of the data variability were discussed in the context of their potential usefulness in diagnosis. Additionally, the cross-validated area under the ROC curve (AUC) was used to assess the expected out-of-sample discrimination index of a different sets of miRNAs. The proposed model allowed us to describe the set of miRNA levels in patients and controls. Three highly correlated miRNAs: miR-101-3p, miR-142-5p, miR-148a-3p rank the highest with almost identical effect sizes that ranges from 0.45 to 1.0. For those miRNAs the credible interval for AUC ranged from 0.63 to 0.67 indicating their limited discrimination potential. A little benefit in adding information from other miRNAs was observed. There were several miRNAs in the dataset (miR-604, hsa-miR-221-5p) for which inferences were uncertain. For those miRNAs more experimental effort is needed to fully assess their effect in the context of new hits discovery and usefulness as disease indicators. The proposed multilevel Bayesian model can be used to characterize the panel of miRNA profile and to assess the difference in expression levels between healthy and cancer individuals.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Bayes Theorem
  • Case-Control Studies
  • Female
  • Gene Expression Regulation, Neoplastic
  • Humans
  • MicroRNAs / genetics*
  • MicroRNAs / metabolism
  • Middle Aged
  • Models, Biological
  • Multilevel Analysis*
  • Ovarian Neoplasms / diagnosis
  • Ovarian Neoplasms / genetics*

Substances

  • MicroRNAs

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the Polish National Science Centre project: 2011/02/A/NZ2/00017 and 2012/07/E/NZ7/04411. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.