Table 1.

Relative expression of AD-relevant miRNAs in the prion diseases sJCD and Gerstmann-Straussler-Scheinker (GSS) indicate a similar up-regulation of these inducible, NF-kB-regulated miRNAs; clinical parameters including age and gender of these human PrD cases (both JCD and GSS) have been described in detail elsewhere (Lukiw et al., 2011).

	Control	AD	sCJD	GSS	Fold increase AD/control	Fold increase CJD/control	Fold increase GSS/control
N	9	12	3	2	-	-	-
miRNA-9-5p	15657	38661	48529	46969	2.5	3.1	3
miRNA-34a-5p	261	1176	1410	1875	4.5	5.4	7.2
miRNA-125b-5p	15310	26424	32150	35213	1.7	2.1	2.3
miRNA-146a-5p	304	1756	1915	2463	5.8	6.3	8.1
miRNA-155-5p	370	968	1182	1222	2.6	3.2	3.3

Numbers under Control, Alzheimer’s disease (AD), sCJD or GSS are the means of each sample’s miRNA signal as indicated; briefly the average ages of sCJD (n = 3) and the controls (n = 6) were 66 ± 8 years and the mean ages of the GSS (n = 2) and controls (n = 6) were 61 years; there were no significant differences in total RNA yield or purity between any AD or control, or prion-affected brain samples (Lukiw et al., 2011; Zhao and Lukiw, 2015; Bhattacharjee et al., 2016); due to their extreme rarity and limited availability, only sCJD and GSS small RNAs, and no brain tissue protein extracts were available for the current investigation; in AD, sCJD, and GSS miRNA-34a exhibited one of the highest up-regulations ranging from 4.5- to 7.2-fold over relevant controls.