Table 1.

Functional mechanism of Circular RNAs in neurological disease.

Neurological disease	Circular RNA	Targets	Mechanisms
AD	CDR1as	miR-7	miR-7 can down-regulate AD-relevant targets, such as UBE2A, which play an important role in the clearance of amyloid peptides in AD (Bingol and Sheng, 2011; Lukiw, 2013)
	Sry	miR-138	miR-138 participate in learning and memory ability by regulating APT1 (Hansen et al., 2013a)
PD	CDR1as	miR-7	miR-7 can downregulate α-synuclein expression and protect cells against oxidative stress (Junn et al., 2009)
Cerebrovascular disease	cANRIL	INK4a	cANRIL can influence INK4/ARF expression and increase the risk of ASVD (Salzman et al., 2013)
Inflammatory neuropathy	hsa-circRNA 2149		Specific expression in leukocytes
	CircRNA100783		CircRNA100783 may be involved in chronic CD28-associated CD8(+)T cell aging (Wang et al., 2015)
	Sry	miR-138	miR-138 can balance the expression between Th1 and Th2 through suppressing the function of RUNX3 (Fu et al., 2015)
Nervous System Neoplasms	CDR1as	miR-7	miR-7 can repress the expression of EGFR, IRS-1 and IRS-2 thus reduce the active and aggressive of glioblastoma (Liu et al., 2014)
Prion disease	CDR1as		PrPC can up-regulate expression of CDR1as (Satoh and Yamamura, 2004; Satoh et al., 2009)