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Effects of Filtration on Glyceraldehyde-3-Phosphate Dehydrogenase mRNA in the Plasma of Trauma Patients and Healthy Individuals

¹ Accident & Emergency Medicine Academic Unit,
² Department of Chemical Pathology, and
³ Department of Anaesthesia and Intensive Care, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Prince of Wales Hospital, Shatin, New Territories, Hong Kong SAR

address correspondence to this author at: Department of Chemical Pathology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Prince of Wales Hospital, Room 38023, 1/F Clinical Sciences Bldg., 30-32 Ngan Shing St., Shatin, New Territories, Hong Kong SAR; fax 852-2194-6171, e-mail loym@cuhk.edu.hk

The first 300 words of the full text of this article appear below.

The biology and role of circulating cell-free nucleic acids in the diagnosis and risk stratification of many critical diseases attracted much interest in the late 1990s (1). Although plasma DNA took early center stage in disease diagnosis, monitoring and risk stratification for many conditions, including pregnancy (2), cancer(3), transplantation(4), and trauma (5)(6), recent publications suggest that the next stage of development of this field may involve plasma RNA (7)(8)(9).

Cell-free RNA exists in small quantities in the plasma of healthy individuals, and qualitative and quantitative studies have demonstrated increased plasma and serum concentrations of tumor-derived RNA in cancer patients (10)(11)(12). Although we have reported that plasma DNA increases in patients early after trauma, correlates with injury severity, and predicts mortality and other posttraumatic complications (5)(6), there are no published studies investigating circulating mRNA in patients after trauma. Unlike nuclear DNA, cellular mRNA is present in much larger copy numbers, exists normally in the cytoplasm and ribosomes of cells, and may therefore be released earlier than nuclear DNA after trauma.

In this study, we investigated whether mRNA was detectable in plasma of trauma patients, whether concentrations correlated with injury severity and posttraumatic complications, and whether filtration might have an effect on the diagnostic interpretation of the results.

The study was approved by the Ethics Committee of The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Twenty-six trauma patients [mean (SD) age, 46 (18) years; 23 males] admitted to the resuscitation room of the Accident and Emergency Department of the Prince of Wales Hospital were recruited with informed consent. Using a well-established injury severity score (ISS) (13), we divided patients into four groups: minor injury . . . [Full Text of this Article]