A recent publication by Yadav et al. (2011) described alcohol-induced changes in miRNA expression levels in human-derived neuroblastoma cells. Although the limited model used by these authors is far from reproducing the physiological environment of the alcohol-exposed human brain, their results are informative and corroborate the role of several of the upregulated miRNAs described by our group (Table 1, column A). Interestingly, Yadav and colleagues also found mostly upregulated miRNAs after alcohol exposure. In fact, after we subset their reported differentially expressed miRNAs for those with p ≤ 0.01 (based on our more stringent statistical analyses of only using the lowest p values and reporting adjusted p values to account for multiple testing), only 20 upregulated miRNAs remain statistically significant. Out of these 20 upregulated miRNAs from ethanol-treated cells, six matched upregulated family members in the alcoholic human brain from our studies (miR-369-3p, miR-34c-5p, miR-203, miR-146a, miR-194, and let-7 family members, Table 1, column B). This is statistically highly significant (p = 0.00022), as it is expected that only one miRNA would be common between the two lists by chance
