Fig. 1. (A) Overview of the design strategy. A multi-stage, case–control study was performed to identify plasma miRNA profiles. (B) Profiles of plasma miRNAs in the case group compared with controls. Total RNA was separately extracted from the case group and the control group. Significant changes in the miRNA profiles were analyzed by pairwise comparisons between the groups. Only miRNAs showing 2-fold changes or greater between the two groups were selected. (Yellow denotes increased expression, blue denotes reduced expression, and a median expression value equal to 1 is denoted by black.).